The SysAdmin force is not going to have to go rebuild the dozens of Gap nations out there. The neocommunists of E. Europe have shown the way out, a quiet retirement for the old guard, lots of advantages and legs up for their children, and a long process of letting in the societal have nots into the halls of power is going to be the outcome for an awful lot of the Gap.

Jim, I agree that the intra-Core issues between the USA and the EU are major. But for Barnett’s purpose, the two-fold division of the world will work OK, since he is trying to get the Pentagon to adopt his map. They won’t be conquering Belgium or France any time soon. (I addressed the very issue of bashing Belgium long ago.)

To address the problems presented by the EU and Old Europe generally, it is the State Department which needs a new map. And boy do they ever.

Hobbes was a creepy dude. His vision of absolute authoritarian utopia is part of what inspired last century’s autocrats, and it is part of what inspires the transnationalists today.

MNB: Whether low trust societies can get out of the Gap is an open question. “But for “core of the core” i would like to include Japan and The Netherlands.” I’d say no because they do not make a significant contribution to the military power of the Core, and I was speaking of the Core in its role of spreading globalization into the less developed areas. Poland and Norway have developed “niche competencies”, as Barnett calls them, which make them more important actors as allies of the USA. Also, it is Anglo-American institutions which are spreading around the world much more so than Dutch or Japanese ones. Still, you are correct that Japan and Holland are major investors and have had a historic role as former colonizers.

Michael: “That our military (and possibly our State Dept.) need to adopt post conflict management and reconstruction, i.e. nation building, into its basic mission.” Barnett talks about the SysAdmin being a military force, but having strong inter-agency ties. So, he is talking about having State involved, but also any other agency which can make a contribution, for example Treasury or Justice or even HHS. I’m not “conflicted” about other countries participating. I think he asserts but does not demonstrate that we will necessarily need foreign help to pull of the Phase 2 part. If we develop this capability, we should be able to go it alone if necessary, and take advantage of foreign country help if it is offered and wanted. I think what Barnett is getting at but either didn’t articulate (or I missed it or forgot it — I read this book a long time ago) is that we want to seem legitimate to foreign counries and we want our state-building to be seen as a service we are doing which benefits everybody. So we will want very much to have others involved. However, coming at it from the other side, imagine we see an imperative need to conquer some place because it is harboring dangerous terrorists, and the rest of the world is opposed to us going in, but we do anyway. Now, we’d rather not devote our efforts to rebuilding the place, but we broke it so we bought it (Colin Powell’s Pottery Barn Doctrine). In that case we’d have to do state-building on our own. This seems to me to be a pretty likely turn of events. “Barnett is applying set theory.” This is exactly right, and I an not criticizing Barnett for dividing the world in half. We have to make simplifying assumptions to make sense of the world or each fleeting perception is unique and we are lost in the details. But once you look at his two groups and try to work with them I saw some immediately some facts which forced me to add a little “granularity” to keep the basic division useful — i.e. the Core of the Core is the USA and certain close allies for a lot of reasons, and in the Gap there is one place which seems to me the most dire problem which should be dealt with first for a lot of reasons. Even he has a distinction between “New Core” and “Old Core”. I think his basic two-part division has utility. But once you start to make specific policy proposals you have to start getting into the finer grain.

Jim: I am in full agreement with your historical points. Barnett does not get heavily involved in the EU and what it is or is not doing. But I think he does so indirectly when he says that if the other Core countries want to have a say in what we do in the Gap then they will have to pay the coin to develop the capabilities to get involved. One course is to develop interoperable niche capabilities. I suspect that he perceives even pretty bitter intra-Core animosities like France v. USA as minor or even trivial compared to the challenges we jointly face in expanding globalization — and to the extent they don’t like what we do, they are in no position to stop us. But I don’t recall any detail on this and consulting the index reveals one entry for “France” and four for “European Union”, none of which shed much light. Bottom line, relations between the EU and the USA are moving the deck chairs around, but the liner will sail on.

All the high-trust societies — Japan, the Netherlands, and Scandinavia — should be important Core players. Provided, of course, they don’t find themselves being dragged down by centralized bureaucratic structures controlled by lower-trust societies, like the European Union. If Barnett believes that “dividing the Core” is bad he should address the problem of nations which seek to profit by “pimping the core” — selling technology and influence they have by virtue of their position in the Core to anti-Core Gap actors.

Barnett’s failure to examine closely hat is going on with the EU is the other main failing in his (generally good) book.

Now a few comments:

Overall, like you, I’m impressed with his two basic concepts:
1. That there exists an interconnected, technologically and socially advanced Core and a Gap which is much less so. And the Gap correlates directly to the likelyhood of our needing to intervene there militarily.
2. That our military (and possibly our State Dept.) need to adopt post conflict management and reconstruction, i.e. nation building, into its basic mission.

I did notice you seem to be highly conflicted on the issue of bringing others into the post-conflict rebuilding phase. On the one hand you state, “I’m not sure why we need the other guys to help us do Part 2 if we were to acquire the skills needed…” and then later complain, “I’m also not sure we really can pull off the kind of rock-bottom nation-building which would be necessary in the worst parts of the Gap.” I have the same internal conflict.

In a sense, this goes right to the heart of international debate we’re having over Iraq. What to do, when to do it, who’s going to do what, who’s responsible, who gets what degree of say, who pays for it. I’m in the group who thinks the US should do the things we believe are absolutely necessary, alone if need be. I also believe we’ll be far, far better off if we can ‘internationalize’ these issues to the maximun extent possible.

We truly need a new paradigm for international order. The UN is most certainly not it, at least insofar as it’s currently configured. I also believe that for the foreseeable future the Europeans are going to remain completely and myopically focussed on building a new political order for themselves, the EU. Russia and China are in similar boats. Each is preoccupied with defining themselves and where they’re going. As long as the world doesn’t go completely to hell, they could almost care less. I wonder if a summit would help?

Another facet of the book seems mistaken to me. Barnett’s Gap is all one color. Core, Gap. Two zones.

This reminds me of the old joke, “There are two kinds of people in the world: Those who think the world can be divided into two kinds of people, and those who don’t.” Clearly, you’re in the second group.

In a way, Barnett is applying set theory. Just because he says we can divide the world ‘thus’ doesn’t mean that’s the only way to divide the world, or that you can’t then subdivide those initial groups, or by applying a different set of parameters get sets with a completely different distribution. It’s just a way organizing. Nothing more. And it can be useful for seeing relationships.

Fukuyama points out that Japan and the Netherlands are more like the US and Britain than France, South Korea and, to a lesser extent, Germany are. Why? Because the samurai underpinning of the Japanese economic classes and the Dutch fight to wrest a nation from the tides fostered the a similar kind of trust. He calls this kind of trust “spontaneous sociability”, the ease at which people form ties and agreements across family boundaries.

One way to look for it is in the structure of large corporations. Are they non-family affairs? Do you need the state to step in to consolidate across family lines? Japanese and Dutch companies are more similar to US and British companies by being cross family alliances, while French, Chinese and, to a lesser extent, German companies tend to be more family affairs. Large French and Chinese companies tended to be nurtured by the state. And, yes, Japan and The Netherlands are more willing to work closely with us in Afghanistan and Iraq than France, Germany or China.

Which brings us to India. Being Anglophone certainly helps their globalization. But what about Fukuyama’s social capital and “spontaneous socialability”? The structure of the large IT outsourcing companies would argue they have “spontaneous sociability”, while the government sponsorship that consolidated the energy and transport sectors would argue against. If they have it, did the British experience bring this to India? The tensions between the Mughal Empire and the Hindi population? I don’t know enough of the culture and history of India to have a feel for it.

India has private property and a legal system that is not just the whim of the nomenklatura. Their globalization should be easier and more complete than China’s despite the poverty in India.

But for “core of the core” i would like to include Japan and The Netherlands. India might make it, which would argue for your Anglosphere leaning. My hunch is that the level of trust across family boundaries may be a better guide to India’s future success.

Thanks for the commentary. Barnett’s book is in my Amazon shopping cart, and will probably move out of the “save for later” category as a result of your post.

Matya no baka

However, even if we want to invest more effort into planning for post-wars, it may be difficult actually to do so effectively. Using the term “sysadmin” as a metaphor for what we want to do may even be a bad idea, because it suggests central planning. What we should perhaps consider systematically is how to boost the social and political infrastructures in conquered countries in ways that will encourage political competition, self-sufficiency and civil society. This is a very difficult task, needless to say, but at least as a concept it incorporates some prudent humility about our (or anyone’s) capacities as nation builders.

Remember that Germany didn’t take off economically after WW2 until Ludwig Erhard — on a Sunday, because that was the only time he had a chance of getting away with it — repealed economic regulations imposed by the occupying powers that were stifling the German economy. I don’t know if Iraq has any incipient Erhards, but I think the first thing we have to consider is how to avoid doing more harm than good. As I said, this is a difficult task.

BTW, just so it’s clear, I should mention that I think that even with the post-war mistakes we’ve made, we’ve still gotten many things right, and Iraq today is enormously better off than it would have been if we hadn’t deposed Hussein.

Jay, your post’s point about the difficulties of “project closeout” are closely akin to the problems of war termination and reconstruction which Barnett and others have been addressing. You are the only person I have seen make the analogy to a more generic issue of satisfactory project termination. I’d like to read something further from you on this. Our former enemies’ security is very much our problem, or any successful military power’s problem, most of the time. Trying to defeat an adversary is so engrossing and difficult, postwar planning seems to barely happen, in most historical cases, or be done on the fly and hence done badly. Having the SysAdmin force in place means there is someone around whose Full Time Job is to do the planning and execution of this phase, and to preserving lessons learned. There is no downside to building this capability.

Critt, while it is true that mapmakers were needed first, it also true that we could go back to into the paleolithicum to the first guy who build a raft as the ancestor of the sailing ships. My point of disagreement with Barnett was not mere antiquarianism, since all current events have roots reaching back to the big bang. My point is that Barnett’s forward-looking project would be better-founded if it were based on what I take to be a more correct reading of the meaning and basis of the current round of globalization. Barnett appears to take the post-1945 world as starting largely anew, with the earlier stage basically over and done with. I assert that the post-1945 phase is largely a resumption and continuation of the earlier British and Anglo-American colonizing and commercial project which culminated in the pre-1914 globalization. This is relevant because it means that we can get a better understanding of the values and institutions we are trying to spread to the Gap if we go back an additional couple of centuries before 1945. The Chinese fleet is interesting but it did not lead to a Sinic Pacific Ocean empire with colonies all over the Western Hemisphere — so it has historical interest but it does not help us much to understand where the current world order came from, or where it might be expected to go, or what it will do when it gets there.

> The source code is therefore not so much the architecture of the early Cold War Wise Men. They put upper stories on a structure that stared much earlier, whose foundations go back to the middle ages in England. This is the source of the liberal order established in its colonies, and which led to the rule set which is now spreading around the world.

Before the security, rule sets and investment were in place that would allowe architects and enginners to build out an infrastructure connecting world resources, the territory had to be surveyed.

In 1421, the largest fleet the world had ever seen sailed from China on a 15th century “Look for resources, and ye shall find.”

Gotta love those map makers, you know?