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A country or region is functioning if it seeks to harmonize its
internal Rule Set with the emerging global rule set: transparency, free markets,
free trade, collective security. We forget we have fought a number of civil
wars, one big violent one over the rule sets we’ve clashed over in this
country. We are fighting a rule set clash right now on gay marriages. Every
time we have one of these rule set clashes we come back to the reality that we
are fifty member states and Massachusetts can do what it damn well pleases.
We are seeing our civil wars replicated
throughout the planet. People say,
I can’t understand these crazy people. All
we need to do is look into ourselves and into our past and we will recognize
every conflict we find around the world - every single one including all the
ones with religious overtones. We’ll
say the global rule set is always evolving. It is not
just Davos man’s interpretation. It
is not just Seattle man’s interpretation. Increasingly it is Osama man’s interpretation - we don’t
want your globalization and we’ll kill you to keep it out. Direction is critical not degree. China is still ruled by the communist party whose ideological
mix is about 30% Marxist-Leninist, about 70% the Sopranos. More important to me,
China joins the WTO - World Trade Organization, imports rule sets it cannot
create indigenously. China just let
a foreign company take control of a Chinese bank - this week. Why? WTO
rule sets demanded it. That’s
a rule set change. A very profound
one. Where will you find it?
Wall Street Journal. So, if
you don’t read the Wall Street Journal right now, you can’t figure out
security [16], I would argue. I’m
not just saying that because they put me on the front page.
Not that I wouldn’t mind being back on the front page.
I’ll say a country or region, it may be functioning
doesn’t mean that bad things can’t happen to it.
It doesn’t repeal the business cycle by a stretch.
You can always fall off the map. That's
a concern we have an Argentina or a Brazil or an India when you see a shift in
the election. Functioning parts of
the world, North American, Europe both old and new, Russia under Putin’s
managed democracy, India in a pock marked sense, China in a coastal sense,
industrialized Asia, South Africa the country, ABC’s in South America: Argentina, Brazil, Chile.
Put a circle around that and call it the functioning core of
globalization - roughly 4 billion out of 6.3 -
2/3 of the world’s population.
So when people try to sell me on the notion that the world has gone to
hell in a handbasket and it’s perpetual war, and its global chaos, and its
American Empire and it’s a global cop role for us, I say nonsense.
Two-thirds of the world functions just fine without our military
interventions and has done so for about a decade and a half.
Just fine. No major
incidents of mass violence anywhere in the core.
Let me show you the other part.
Here’s the natural demand pattern that emerges for security export
since the end of the cold war. U.S.
crisis response since 1990 - almost 150 separate interventions not including
straightforward humanitarian assistance and disaster relief - so some danger of
guns going off. This is the
pattern. Now simple political
scientist that I am, I drew a line around it and I said what is it about these
regions that continue to draw our attention.
Understanding that this is a fairly simplistic approach, I’m trapping
some very globalized societies in there like a Singapore, like an Israel.
I briefed the Israelis and I briefed the Singaporeans and they say we
have no problem with your description of the world.
We know exactly what neighborhood we live in.
This is why we enjoy having you as a big security partner… Singapore
says, you want to park that carrier? Bring
it right here. Pier not long enough? Let’s
add 50 yards. And I
understand I’m leaving the cold war’s tail bone, North Korea up there in an
otherwise stable North East Asia and why he matters, I would argue is because
his take down should create the basis for a East Asia NATO and the beginning of
a strategic partnership between us and China.
So he still has a function to serve. I’m going to call this the
non-integrating Gap. It’s
globalizations ozone hole. It’s
bald spot. If you are fighting against globalization, the content flows
you don’t want it in your neck of the woods because it is so challenging to
your traditional society because it empowers women disproportionately to men, or
if you can’t win at globalization, you’re too poor, you don’t have the
legal rule sets to attract the foreign direct investment that’s been integrated
into China for the last 20 years.
People say China has the
ability to build up its military, I say as long as it gets $50 billion a year in
foreign direct investment from the
outside world it does but there is just no such thing as unilateral development
anymore - not for the United States, not for anybody. War within the context of everything else. [17] Meanwhile
when George Bush asks, Are you with us or against us on September 12th
2001, we’re surprised by who is with us.
You know what? It is not
really a choice so much as an understanding of where they are in history and
where they want to go. Now one of the problems the Bush Administration has faced
ever since 9-11 is they keep enunciating security policies that seem like
reversals of long held cherished ideals that got us through the cold war
successfully - like preemption. My
mom called me up after that speech President Bush gave.
She said in effect, don’t those idiots in the White House realize what
they are doing? They are
going to ruin mutual assured destruction.
Are we supposed to attack China tomorrow?
I said, settle down Mom. I’m
the futurist in the family. Nothing
changes with mutual assured destruction across the core.
Nothing changes in terms of deterrence.
Isn’t it amazing that we no longer talk about strategic arms
limitations talks with anybody across this core?
Nobody. It was the dominant security agenda for about 25 years.
I thought my whole career was going to be about arms talks.
Nobody talks about it anymore. Nobody.
Nobody even notices that we don’t even talk about it anymore.
When we’re talking about preemption, we’re talking inside the gap. My best evidence? International
Criminal Court has this article, I think it is Article 98.
It is an exclusionary article, which says in effect, you can be exempted
from being sued by another country if you choose to invade that country and
engage in acts that could be considered worth suing over.
In effect, it is an interventionary pre-nup.
We have created treaties to take advantage of that exemption under the
ICC International Criminal Court. We
have signed about 70 of them at last count.
68 of them are inside the Gap. So
it is no secret about where we are going with this war on terrorism. And it is no secret where we are not going.
Increasingly we are seeing the definition of a seam of deterrence or
suppression for bad things coming out of the gap and into the core: 3 biggies -
pandemics, terrorism and illegal narcotics.
So it is not just one rule set for the United States and another for the
rest of the world. It is understanding that globalization is not a binary
outcome. It is not nowhere or
everywhere. It’s a What and a
Where. Show
me where globalization is, I’ll show you connectivity. I’ll show you rule
sets. I’ll show you no mass
violence. Show me where
globalization isn’t, I’ll show you much less connectivity, far fewer
rule sets and basically all the wars, all the civil wars, all the ethnic
cleansing, all the genocide, all the employment of mass rape as a tool of
terror, all the situations where children are forced into combat units, I’ll
show you the vast majority of the drug producers, the vast majority of
transnational terrorist groups that we care about - all inside the red (gap).
No mystery.
So it is not when unilateralism makes sense, it
is where. The core is still the
world of multilateralism. We
are a strange sort of empire. We
go around and ask everybody in the world, Can we pretty-please invade Iraq?
before we did it - which was not how empires throughout history have been run; don’t
remember with Joe Stalin, Adolph Hitler, the Romans; don’t remember anybody
doing it like that. We have seen a
huge uptick in bilateral security assistance to what I call the seam states that
ring this gap. So we have big
interests in South African banking networks that we fear Al Qaeda is accessing
as sort of a backdoor. We are
concerned about the ability of people to move in and out of Thailand’s
northern forests. We’re concerned
about this juncture of terrorism, narcotics and rebels.
So we are making big efforts. If
you track U.S. bilateral security assistance, since 9-11 you will find it all
ringing that gap very explicitly. When we engage in unilateralism inside the
gap, frankly it is a form of functional unilateralism. We are the only military in the world that can send massive
amounts of power at great distances an actually use it.
I think it was last year China sent 800 peacekeepers to central Africa
and within about 3 weeks, they were bitching about the logistics.
800 guys, their guns and their pup tents and they were straining at the
leash. We
send something like quarter of a million troops to the Middle East and all the
stuff that goes with them to wage war. Nobody
else comes even close to that. So
we can ask the UN to bless us with a resolution and dress us with coalition
partners but frankly we don’t need for the war fighting part but we find very
handy for the peace keeping part.
But the major employment of war fighting assets around the world
is going to be done by the United States in a functionally unilateral
role. It is not the U.S. flaunting
the rules, but stepping up to the unique tasks of not global cop, but a
policeman frankly that walks the beat 24/7 inside the gap and there are
different Rule Sets between those two arenas. [18]
It’s a lot like talking to a cop in Los Angeles. Do
you behave the same way in Brentwood that you behave in South Central?
[19]
He says no.. and you ask why? He
says, because I want to get home for dinner in one piece. And the Rule Sets
aren’t the same in South Central as they are in Brentwood.
If you expect me to go there, you’re going to have to understand that.
Frankly, we have to understand that and our European allies have to
understand that. When we go inside the gap and do these kinds of things. I
like to emphasize that this is a very bondable problem but it is a very
big problem in terms of geography.
Here is my favorite map.
It is called the Peter’s Projection.
It is favored by the U.N. and
no, I’m not talking about Ralph Peters because that map would have a war
everywhere. What is so great
about the Peter’s Projection is that everything lines up north to south, east
to west which makes it really easy to figure things out.
Another thing that’s cool and why it looks so distorted frankly to the
normal eye is that it is geographically accurate.
Here is a secret of cartography. If
you’ve ever looked at the Defense Department map, you’re misguided.
Greenland is actually much smaller than Africa.
They are not actually the same size.
Here is what my gap looks like on this map.
It is big. Now one of the
first things we notice, since the fall of the Berlin Wall, we close over 150
bases, major bases - a thousand people or more across the core.
Two dozen and counting new ones inside the gap.
So Andy Hoehn, Office of the Secretary of Defense, his big plan for moving
bases around the world frankly all it involves is moving them closer to the gap.
That’s all it involves. This
is your expeditionary theatre for the 21st century.
It’s not going away. You
can vote Bush/Cheney out of office.
[20] It
will still be there. So president
after president, administration after administration, Republican and Democrat
are going to have to deal with this. One
of the first things we discover in this global war on terrorism - We’ve got a
lot of different cooks working on this broth.
We’ve got Southern Command, European command, Central Command, Pacific
Command. Basically Precinct
captains in what is logically described and is largely an undercover war
[21].
So one of the first things Secretary Rumsfeld did in
this global war on terrorism very indicative I would argue, of his approach to
transformation instead of going directly at existing institutions and say
change. He designates a cannibalizing agent, and says go be more like them.
And that cannibalizing agent where the warfighting ethos of the U.S.
Military is going to migrate and has been migrating for quite some time is
Special Operations Command. That's
why they were given operational control of the global war on terrorism. And we are seeing a redefinition of Strategic Command as a
global strike force - the beginnings of a matrixed organization .
War fighting is going to migrate in the direction of these two commands
previously considered just supporting. Now
leads in their own right in distinct contrast to the so-called proconsuls of
combatant commanders role.
Some of the implications we draw
from this map....First we emphasize the advantages of exterior position.
All of the good stuff is on the outside no matter how you measure it. Fiber optic cable, money, R&D, population, wealth, trade,
it’s all better on the outside. It
is a very bondable problem. We talk
about the need for more sensors because we have to reduce ambiguous warning.
Why? Because we want to be
about prevention not just retaliation. We
have not caught up to that yet. Frankly
that is what generated Secretary Rumsfeld’s Snowflake they published on the
front page of USA Today - asking for metrics.
A very honest question which of course brings upon him immediate ridicule
and speculations that he is leaving office because Americans don’t like to
think strategically. Already the
historians and the grand strategists and the empire thinkers, who if they
thought about it for 10 seconds and if they remembered what they wrote prior to
the invasion, would understand we weren’t going to deal or transform the
Middle East in a matter of 12 months. All
these guys are already declaring this an absolute failure after 12 months. That’s the level of grand strategy we have in this country.
We have historians declaring the grand march of history over in 12
months. A premium on forward
deterrence and strike. We have to
stay out there. We have to avoid
what we’ve been doing for the last 15 years which is sucking the troops back
home.
So are the boys coming home?
No. The boys are never coming home.
No exit. No exit strategy.
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