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DDC Note: Thomas Barnett and his book were featured on C-Span Book TV over the weekend of September 4, 2004. Mr. Barnett's presentation of narrated graphics was impressive. He seems to be a brilliant man with extremely important information about our future and the future of the world. Something everyone should read and heed, particularly during these dangerous times.

The Pentagon's New Map:
War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century
Author: Thomas Barnett
Publisher: Putnam
April 2004

>From the Publisher
A groundbreaking reexamination of U.S. and global security,certain to be one of the most talked about books of the year.

Since the end of the Cold War, America's national security establishment has been searching for a new operating theory to explain how this seemingly "chaotic" world actually works. Gone is the clash of blocs, but replaced by what?

Thomas Barnett has the answers. A senior military analyst with the U.S. Naval War College, he has given a constant stream of briefings over the past few years, and particularly since 9/11, to the highest of high-level civilian and military policymakers-and now he gives it to you. The Pentagon's New Map is a cutting-edge approach to globalization that combines security, economic, political, and cultural factors to do no less than predict and explain the nature of war and peace in the twenty-first century.

Building on the works of Friedman, Huntington, and Fukuyama, and then taking a leap beyond, Barnett crystallizes recent American military history and strategy, sets the parameters for where our forces will likely be headed in the future, outlines the unique role that America can and will play in establishing international stability-and provides much-needed hope at a crucial yet uncertain time in world history.

For anyone seeking to understand the Iraqs, Afghanistans, and Liberias of the present and future, the intimate new links between foreign policy and national security, and the operational realities of the world as it exists today, The Pentagon's New Map is a template, a Rosetta stone. Agree with it, disagree with it, argue with it-there is no book more essential for 2004 and beyond.

Author Biography: Dr. Thomas P. M. Barnett, senior strategic researcher and professor at the U.S. Naval War College, served from October 2001 to June 2003 as assistant for strategic futures in the Defense Department's Office of Force Transformation.

Synopsis
The countries of the world that have been successfully integrated into the globalized "functioning core" are not going to be a threat to world peace and stability, argues Barnett (U.S. Naval War College), rather it is the "non-integrating gap" that will give rise to instability and terrorists threats in the future. This is the central idea upon which he rests his discussion of U.S. global military strategy. He argues that the U.S. should aggressively use its military to integrate dysfunctional states into the core, such as he believes we are doing in Iraq (although he is critical of the Bush administration's inability to gain international support for the endeavor). This mission requires a significant reordering of the military and he calls for a unified command structure and the creation of two distinct parts of the military: one a quick-strike force and the other a "System Administrator" force that would carry out nation- building activities. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

>From The Critics
Publisher's Weekly
Barnett, professor at the U.S. Naval War College, takes a global perspective that integrates political, economic and military elements in a model for the post-September 11 world. Barnett argues that terrorism and globalization have combined to end the great-power model of war that has developed over 400 years, since the Thirty Years War. Instead, he divides the world along binary lines. An increasingly expanding "Functioning Core" of economically developed, politically stable states integrated into global systems is juxtaposed to a "Non-Integrating Gap," the most likely source of threats to U.S. and international security. The "gap" incorporates Andean South America, the Caribbean, sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia and much of southwest Asia. According to Barnett, these regions are dangerous because they are not yet integrated into globalism's "core." Until that process is complete, they will continue to lash out. Barnett calls for a division of the U.S. armed forces into two separate parts. One will be a quick-strike military, focused on suppressing hostile governments and nongovernment entities. The other will be administratively oriented and assume responsibility for facilitating the transition of "gap" systems into the "core." Barnett takes pains to deny that implementing the new policy will establish America either as a global policeman or an imperial power. Instead, he says the policy reflects that the U.S. is the source of, and model for, globalization. We cannot, he argues, abandon our creation without risking chaos. Barnett writes well, and one of the book's most compelling aspects is its description of the negotiating, infighting and backbiting required to get a hearing for unconventional ideas in the national security establishment. Unfortunately, marketing the concepts generates a certain tunnel vision. In particular, Barnett, like his intellectual models Thomas Friedman and Francis Fukuyama, tends to accept the universality of rational-actor models constructed on Western lines. There is little room in Barnett's structures for the apocalyptic religious enthusiasm that has been contemporary terrorism's driving wheel and that to date has been indifferent to economic and political factors. That makes his analytical structure incomplete and more useful as an intellectual exercise than as the guide to policy described in the book's promotional literature. 100,000 first printing.

Library Journal
Barnett (U.S. Naval War Coll.) here proposes a clear and comprehensive strategy for the United States based on the distinction between "core" states integrated through the world economy and states in the nonintegrated "gap." Because threats to security emanate from states in the gap, the author seeks to shrink the gap by promoting altered "rule sets" governing the flow of people, energy, investment, and security. America's role is to export security and advance connections between the core and the diminishing gap. The author carefully explains why his approach differs from strategic thought aimed at subduing what he calls "arcs of crisis" or "the main enemy." He also makes a good case against those who advocate withdrawal from an "empire" or a "global-chaos strategy." Though he supports the war in Iraq, he criticizes the Bush administration for fostering an impression of vindictiveness rather than a "future worth creating." The reader must imagine how Barnett would deal with states that prefer to remain disconnected, but overall this is an important contribution to debates about globalization and U.S. military policy. Recommended for all academic and public libraries

Kirkus Reviews
A sometimes strange, sometimes Strangelovean white paper destined to top policy-wonk reading lists in the months to come-especially if, as the author suggests, the Pentagon is taking it seriously. "I am proposing a new grand strategy on a par with the Cold War strategy of containment-in effect, its historical successor," writes Barnett (Naval War College). That strategy is hydra-headed, but at the start it involves recognizing which of the world's countries are part of the Functioning Core, signed on to the globalization club, and which are part of the Non-Integrating Gap, "largely disconnected from the global economy and the rule sets that define its stability." (Barnett is fond of Capitalized Concepts.) By this sharp division, a broad equatorial swath across the planet, comprising sick and troublesome nations such as Indonesia and Saudi Arabia, lies beyond the pale of Euroamerican reason, whereas Russia, Chile, and, perhaps surprisingly, China are to be counted as allies, real or potential, and even friends. One of the tasks for the US, Barnett writes, is to develop what he calls "a reproducible strategic concept" by which to guide the military in global actions, reproducible meaning one on whose terms Democrats and Republicans can largely agree. "Trust me," Barnett breezily writes, "the military wants this sort of bipartisan consensus in the worst way." Such repurposing is necessary if we are to set an example for the rest of the civilized world, which seems disinclined to subscribe to our rule set. The Strangelove element comes in when Barnett makes extramilitary policy recommendations, as when he urges that a component of Western foreign aid be to encourage "the widespread use ofbio-engineered crops," demands the removal of Kim Jong Il from power in North Korea (an inevitability, Barnett says, if Bush is reelected), and prophesies that the US will admit many new states in the next 50 years-including Mexico. A game of Risk between hard covers. Endlessly fascinating-but endlessly weird.