Critical review of Tom Barnett's The Pentagon's New Map

¶ … Pentagon's New Map

One of the greatest dangers and most common military fallacies of the leaders of a nation are to engage in the fighting of the last war, rather than the current and future strategic challenges facing the world. The United States military leaders were not exempt from this mistake, says Tom Barnett, in his book, the Pentagon's New Map, during the 1990's. Then, America was still focused in its design more upon on fighting the Cold War of the past, rather than looking to see how the new world order would create a different series of geographic alliances, between what the author calls functional and dysfunctional states.

Although he is a product of the Pentagon and the American military system of education himself, Barnett argues that tragically, the containment of a bipolar power like the Soviet Union was entirely different than that of keeping American's borders safe from terrorism. "When the Cold War ended, our real challenge began." (1) the Soviet Union, although a tyranny, was still a cohesive structure, unlike the nations of the Middle East, Latin and Central America, and the other global dysfunctional powers that offer a plethora of threats, rather than a unified threat to the world. America must deploy globalization in an effective fashion by ideologically unifying with other functional countries to create better security precautions.

But despite such global efforts, America can and must assume a leading world security role. This professor at the U.S. Naval College thus takes as his central theme that of 'America sleeping' during the events of 9/11, but provides as the answer or thesis of his book, the need for greater interconnectedness with other nations, rather than the besieged, bunker mentality of independence that he feels still characterizes the mentality of many military and government officers today. America must police rogue states, he advocates, but clean up the mess that is left, politically and economically afterwards with a specially organized force, rather than in a disconnected, 'whatever works' strategy without formal protocols. Interestingly enough, the author cites his "Midwestern optimism" and his status as a 60's child as equally important as constructing his thesis of the need for greater international unity and strategic sharing of information and data regarding security and terrorism between what he calls functional states, against dysfunctional states, as his military background.

The book traces the shell-shocked strategic attitude after the cold war's demise to the 1990's conflagrations of European nationalism in Eastern Europe. Then, America was not "a global cop," as it had been in the past and still, perhaps fancied itself, but "a global fireman," putting out occasional fires, but not picking up the pieces, rebuilding and recreating political systems torn apart by strife, or teaching the participants not to create fires in the future. (5) This created national ill will towards America, leading to the terrorist threat of today -- and beyond.

Barnett's proposal to create a nation building 'after the fight' force is intriguing, and having specific protocols for American military behavior to do so might have been helpful in Iraq. But the author strikes an alarming note to the reader's ear when offering his most controversial predictions, such as the United States' possible annexation of nearby nations fifty years hence. Perhaps the most controversial assertion of the text is that the "terrorist attacks of 9/11 simply revealed the yawning gap between the military we built to win the Cold War and the different" military system, strategy, and strategic alliance, "we need to built" to "secure globalization's ultimate goal," which is the end of war as we know it. (2) Although we would like "connectivity" to trump all, this is not an easy thing to achieve -- is the end to war really a valid long-term military objective, and will not the active pursuit of dysfunctional states create more war, rather than less conflict in the short-term?

Barnett's book is interesting to read in view of recent, frequent criticisms of the United States' recent actions in Iraq, for even the staunchest supports of the war now critique the Bush Administration, perhaps with the benefit of hindsight, for failing to seek regional and international support for the war. The administration sought instead to 'go it alone,' which Barnett himself finds ill advised. However, if America had not 'gone it alone' would we ever have toppled Saddam Hussein? Although Barnett is persuasive in arguing that we all have as a world an interest in great permeability of information, borders, economies, and military alliances, in combating terrorism, he fails to address how different national cultures and attitudes can be towards military involvement, even those countries of the world that have been successfully integrated into the global functioning core of states.