Photo of the Korea’s at night. One is completely disconnected, the other obviously plugged in
Right now Jaffna is under effective siege, cut off via A9 (road) and sea. I’m not going to dwell on the specifics so much. The A9 was opened under the cease-fire but now it’s closed. The reasons are twofold, one is that the LTTE collects millions of dollars in tolls from the road. Two is that the LTTE has been blowing shit up in Colombo and Galle. Explosive people things and people move down the A9, hence. Unfortunately, food always moves up and down the A9. And ordinary people who just want to get out. Hence hence. Trouble. In fact the peace talks broke down over this point, and the fact that the talks had no point. I’m not going to address this issue cause it’s a motherfucking bramblebush, but rather the general drift of the thing. I’ve been reading this book that describes the nature of modern conflict. PM Barnett describes the conflict as this age as not being ‘Democracy vs Terrorism’ or ‘Islam vs West’ but rather as ‘Connectivity vs Disconnectivity’. I think there may be a better word for that.
The Book: Pentagon’s New Map
Pentagon’s New Map, by PM Barnett
I’m unconvinced that Donald Rumsfeld could find his ass with both hands, let alone map strategic thought. The Pentagon as an institution has taken a plane in the side and a cancer in the center, but there are still some thinkers associated with US Foreign Policy. Thomas Barnett was a interesting researcher and briefer from the Naval War College, now independent. His brief on the Pentagon’s New Map was given to every Air Force officer that reached General. It was also an Esquire article, then a book. I read the book and it’s innovative. Barnett is kinda an ass and half the book is devoted to how awesome he is at PowerPoint, but I’m probably just jealous. The brief has multiple parts, but I’m only concerned with one:
The world can be roughly divided into two groups: the Functioning Core, characterized by economic interdependence, and the Non-Integrated Gap, characterized by unstable leadership and absence from international trade. The Core can be sub-divided into Old Core (North America, Western Europe, Japan, Australia) and New Core (China, India). The Disconnected Gap includes the Middle East, South Asia (except India), most of Africa, Southeast Asia, and northwest South America.
Basically, he defines the conflict of the world as being those connected (globalized) and those disconnected. Not necessarily haves and have-nots, because it is possible to have cash without freedom (as per Saudi Arabia). Beyond simply philosophically dividing the world, he maps out the sources of conflict across the globe (view full size of map above). Specifically, he mapped where the US has made military/security interventions and drawn a border round the general cocked-upedness.
Interestingly, it’s equatorial, and it seems to be a coherent region. These regions are not united by religion, race, or even poverty. Rather, they are simply disconnected from the financial and communicative networks that bind human beings together with words and not bullets.
Show me where globalization is thick with network connectivity, financial transactions, liberal media flows, and collective security, and I will show you regions featuring stable governments, rising standards of living, and more deaths by suicide than murder. These parts of the world I call the Functioning Core, or Core. But show me where globalization is thinning or just plain absent, and I will show you regions plagued by politically repressive regimes, widespread poverty and disease, routine mass murder, and—most important—the chronic conflicts that incubate the next generation of global terrorists. These parts of the world I call the Non-Integrating Gap, or Gap. (Esquire Article)
The Core
These nations do not have religion or race in common, but rather a common rule-set. They have legal, economic and social systems that play nice with each other and generally keep things from getting violent. This rule-site is broad, but it includes laws, business practices, airports, infrastructure, communications protocols and brands. There is a globalized world where your cell-phone will get roaming, your bank card will withdraw cash and your embassy can bail you out of jail. Your data will be carried by Cisco routers, your ass by Toyotas and you can catch the flight out on Star Alliance. There is a technological, economic and communicative rule-set that binds all the countries in the core, and it all rests on an unspoken security guarantee.
Technology: Meaning science and technology. There are certain ‘modern’ innovations which are common to Core countries, to differing degrees. Foremost are Airports, which provide the main vector for globalization forces into a country. This is also the channel that gets attacked first. Then come roads, cars, and petrol. These are all international goods, the supply of which binds you to the rest of the world. Then there is also Western Medicine, penicillin, surgery, medication, etc. There are also international engineering standards, architecture, and more. All these provide the raw infrastructure of the core.
Economy: Currency (preferably floating) connects Core countries, and their currencies are traded. They also have credit and capital markets, stock exchanges and the other mathematics that forms the discourse between natures. Even more obviously, Core countries (including China) participate in the World Trade Organization and try to adopt trade and intellectual property policies to match. In fact, WTO membership means they have to. There are also other orgs like World Bank and IMF, but those tend to draw peripheral nations into this rule-set more than to serve members. At the consumer level there are also international ATMs, Visa and Mastercard processing, and PayPal.
Communications: Atop all this infrastructure there is a common language among core countries. This also covers the last Millennium Development Goal – ‘Global Partnerships’. They include electricity, radios, televisions, and computers. They include Cisco routers, undersea cables and cell phone towers. It also means English in some places, and some English media. Also English speaking interfaces with the rest of the world. It means Internet, preferably high speed, and access to international media and news. It is connection to the global conversation.
Security: Subscribing to these high level rule-sets and their benefits means that Core countries have ‘something to lose’. They’re dependent on international travel, so they need friendly neighbors. They need oil, so they need stability (even tyrannical stability) in the Middle East. Their citizens (like in China) have become used to a certain standard of living so they can’t bomb the shit out of break-away islands without tanking the stock market and inviting internal rebellion. Once they let the Internet and communications technology in, restricting them will cause a huge fuss over those same networks. All the values the US is bombing to instill flow almost naturally from the rule-sets of Core countries. A connected country feels pain when it tears the global fabric, so it’s less likely to be aggressive. Of course, the US is a counter-example of what batshit-insane leadership can do, but I digress.
The Gap
And here are the have-nots. These countries are outside the Core not because they are Muslim or Communist or poor. They simple lack the prerequisites to join the global game
Technology: Despite being between, say, Florida and Bangkok, no one ever connects through Africa. I can’t name an African airline besides South African. That conduit doesn’t have much human current flowing through it and that makes it prohibitively expensive. Also, roads are bad and petrol too tends to be expensive. Countries that are absolutely cut off have petrol shortages and embargoes, like North Korea and Jaffna now. Then there is a shortage of international consumer goods, and again high prices. Finally, there is a dearth of engineers and doctors and the basic infrastructure of The Core.
Economy: Many Gap countries have hyperinflated or spasmodic currencies, like Zimbabwe or Cuba. They also have weak capital markets, few credit card holders, limited credit information, and highly cash economies. In Sri Lanka, for example, most people buy houses or cars with straight-up cash (no lease or mortgage), which would be unheard of in the West. The fact that these small calculations are not done means that a whole number of higher order operations are neglected. Gap countries also have crappy banking sectors with lots of (some sketchy) banks, poor Basel II compliance, limited use of Visa/Mastercard, and no access to online payments like PayPal.
Communications: Because these countries lack infrastructure they also lack the voice to be heard in the global discourse. They have poor electricity, limited and sometimes suppressed media, less access to international news and media, crappy or non-existent Internet and unavailable or expensive phone and data services. They also lack significant English education, and the base of English speakers to do business and communicate with The Core. Not only do they not have the ‘stuff’ to participate, they lack even a voice.
Security: These countries have fuck-all to lose, so they can generally behave like spoilt brats with artillery. Saddam was so isolated he thought he could invade Iran and Kuwait with impunity. Castro was quite content to court annihilation by hosting Soviet missiles. Kim Jong Il will keep blowing up his nation’s GDP in the mountains cause there is only so much you can take away from people eating tree bark. Kim can continue getting his lobster thermidor through good old corruption and the manufacture of counterfeit money and sale of arms. They have nothing to lose and their populations are so isolated that they have neither the tools nor the knowledge to agitate.
The Conflict
Song from Team America:World Police
The above are largely my own observations, but Barnett goes on to posit that the current ‘Clash of Civvies” is between The Core and The Gap. It is essentially a clash between the forces of Globalization and forces that want to retreat to a (usually religious) fundamentalist state, ‘self-sufficient’, rejecting ‘Western’ media, laws, medicine, technology (except nukes), economics (capitalism), and ‘foriegn’ people. In effect, drawing back into the Gap, into the abyss. This is what I’ve described as following the J-Curve, retreating to the nearest peak where everything feels safe rather than braving the rockier path to long-term prosperity.
In Barnett’s example, groups like Al Qaeda aren’t necessarily trying to destroy the west. They want to remove the Western occupation from the Holy Places and Palestine and establish a hardcore Gap Caliphate, cut off from the rest of the world and its ungodly laws, media, and money. In the local example, the LTTE too rejects the idea that it’s illegal to field child soldiers, it’s bad form to kill opposition journalists, and that taxation without representation is so 1775. To a lesser degree, but it’s the same drawing away from Core norms into some ‘safe’ and ultimately lonely and poor place.
The Over-Reaction
Like any novel immune reaction, the unfortunate response of Core states to this tension is to inflame it. When a disconnected Gap state like North Korea throws a nuclear tantrum, the Core responds my disconnecting it even more. Cutting off more trade, more oil, more travel, and more banking. Cuba is another case where the US simply refused to engage. The US today also refuses to or barely engages with Syria, Iran, and assorted baddies. Unfortunately, this often has the effect of leaving Gap nations to fester and wither in an isolated petri dish of despotism and tyranny.
North Korea is actually one of the most ‘stable’ nations because it’s people have limited technology, no money and also no clue as to what they’re missing. The government doesn’t change much. Lil Kim’s massive army near Seoul keeps military intervention at bay and his isolation means that the slow workings of media and economy don’t come into play.
In the same way Cuba’s dictator Castro thrived under sanctions, as did Saddam and as Iranian Ayatollah Controllahs kinda do. Cutting a nation of for the world is in many ways the best possible scene for a tyrant because the corruption gets through and the good is entirely blocked.
The Greater Strategic Goal
There are very valid reasons for cutting off belligerent nations – so they don’t get weapons, so they don’t get money to pay and arm oppressive armies, so corrupt bastards don’t get all the money, etc. However, nations imposing can forget the greater goal, which is bringing countries into the Core. I’m not saying that sanctions are bad, I’m just saying that turning away should be the last resort.
The goal and the victory is bringing Gap nations into the global Rule-Set, so that they have internal incentives to provide Security, and so they actually do it. This means not just knocking over their tyrants, it means building the technological, economic and communicative systems that can provide long-term peace. And that means engagement. It means negotiating with people you do not like, it means accepting some chance that weapons may get through with goods, and not fleeing in terror at the sight of terrorism. That is the easy response, the political expedient response, but it is not the right one. Making that hard decision to engage, to negotiate, and to connect, that is hard. That takes real leadership, real courage. Any third-rate warlord can make war or block a road. How many have the balls to turn around in the face of terror and steady their hand, open it, and unite a nation? Gandhi, Martin Luther King, not many. But they never took their eyes off the ball. In the face of inciteful violence and water cannons they held steady and said ‘we want to connect, we want to live in peace not pride, in harmony not dischord’. They never took their eyes off the greater strategic goal, and they won something worth winning.
I, of course, have never made this choice on a social level, but the way I understand it is working through a relationship. Relationships and marriage (I guess) are bloody hard and counterintuitive sometimes. Sometimes your Sig Oth says some horrible shit, or you just get backed in a corner and you feel like leaving. The strong overpowering instinct is ‘fuck this, fuck you, I’m leaving’. However, in a strong relationship you feel that urge and they you say ‘this is worth it, i’ll stay’. I’ll engage with this person, I’ll deal with their craziness, I’ll work this through and things will get better. If that person is important to you. Of course, some relationships aren’t worth it, but on a global level I think that the relationship with the people of North Korea, of Cuba, of Iraq and, yes, of Jaffna is definitely worthwhile and we should definitely stick it through. There are plenty of attractive women there and they are ronery. We should never forget the goal and the end strategy. It’s not about punishing bad guys and getting revenge, it’s about building a more secure world. It’s about connecting this fragile web and making it a bit more difficult to tear. That is not to say I’m against closing the A9 or North Korean sanctions or whatever. Those things do have their place. All I’m saying is we should never take our eyes off the goal. Connectivity.
Quite interesting observation, both by Barnett and you. Few clarifications.
During the time of the line between “core” and “gap” countries were created, was there a concept of Globalization?
Eg: Even during the 19th century USA, UK and Europe was in the “core” and south Asia/Africa etc were in the “gap”. How can we interpret the difference between these 2 parts of the world was based on “sticking into a religious fundamentalism, rejecting foreigners, rejecting media etc etc? We all know most of the Europe was fundamentalist in religion, during 19th century. We all know they (Germany etc) rejected foreigners. But still they were developed! How?
So can we generalize, by simply adopting a “non-fundamentalist” structure, or “not rejecting foreigners” we can move from Gap to the Core?
And, Barnett describe “religious fundamentalism” mainly “targeting” the middle east. What about the religious fundamentalism in Europe? And, isn’t “rejecting” Muslims in America is “rejecting foreigners”? Isn’t Rejecting “Al Jazeera” and non western media is “Rejecting Media”?
All in all, I see “the other side” of Barnett’s observations, which you didn’t see.
This is again looking at things from the “American eye”.
They purposely forget, the wealth they’ve (Western world) stolen from Asian and African countries, during 18th & 19th century colonial era. It is “that stolen wealth” which create the gap between, this “Core” and the “Gap” countries today. Not the “connectivity” and “Disconnectivity”.
Try to understand it by this example.
Imagine 2 boys are running towards a Mango tree, full of fruit. One boy “A” starts running 10 meters ahead of the other boy “B”. Now, with the staring advantage, boy A will quickly come to the mango tree and eat the bulk of the fruit. Poor boy “B” can pluck only the rotten fruit.
Now think Boy A is the western world at the turn of 20th century. They have the “Starting advantage” of all the stolen wealth from Asia and Africa. Asia/Africa on the other hand like the boy “B”, who starts with a disadvantage. Now both are running towards the mango tree named “Development”. Who will be benifited?
This gap is still there in the 21st century. Western philosophers interpret this, time to time with different POV’s.
Barnett’s this approach is the latest. If you want to bridge this gap, first the western world should help Asia/Africa to get on their feet without hidden agenda’s. They (Western world) have to pay back all the stolen wealth in colonial era. Unless, this type of analysis can be seen as a “Boy A in the above example, finding faults of boy B, for his inability to reach the mango tree at the same speed”. They all forget the “starting gap”.
Or else, the other option for Asia/Africa is to “re-define” the word “Development”. You and me, we all look at “Development” as “Being like in America”. But, there may be other unexplored avenues where we can reach “development”. South Korea, Malaysia, Singapore moved from “Gap” to “Core” NOT BY DEPENDING ON theories created by people like Barnett. Look at how the democracy works in these countries. It’s totally different from western definitions of democracy
Ah! Ha. Now, if we can look at how the New Core (China, India), moved away from “Gap” to be placed in the “Functioning Core. These are 2 of the most “patritic” nations on earth, and they thoroughly refuse western media and philosophy. They a re fundementalist. So, how can such countries be placed in the “functioning core” according to this definitions? There is “some thing” untapped by Barnett. Right?
Did they gave up the religious fundementalism? India? huh!
Of course, communism is a religion for Chinese! Fundementalist. Did they adopted western media? Chania? Never. India? India invaded western media. Look at MTV. And you may know how “disconnected” China is, when it come to the world wide web and business over the net.
So, moving from “Gap” to “Core” cannot be simply achived, just by eliminating religious fundementalism, adopting western media, or connecting online. It’s much more hard work!
India and China, moved to the “functioning Core” according to Barnett’s definition, because they re-define the word development.
BTW. This article is good food for thought. Thanks for that. I took a print out of it, to study further. :-)
Glad you liked it, book is good. You’re still fundamentally misunderstanding the point. Joining the Core isn’t about adopting Western values or even media. That stuff can happen, but the main points are economics and security. On both those counts India and China are definitely in the core.
Take China, to start. China thawed considerably under Deng Xiaoping and his philosophy (not Mao’s) is the backbone of modern China. China is now a significant market economy. As Barnett say,
The whole point is that economics trumps ideology. Media is a part of that, but the real meat is economics and security. I won’t even get into India (one of the few friends America has left) cause they’re orientation is pretty obvious, but both countries are integrating rapidly into the global economy (with accompanying technology and communications) and that makes them players in the Core.
Oh yes. I get what you mean.
Even the open economy adopted by Deng Xiao or Narasingha Rao was not the “pure capitalism” as in west. West looked at it as China and India moving towards capitalism. But, what happened actually is Deng & Rao innovated new economic policies to the world. They’ve adopted the open economy to their respective countries, and culture. What Barnett and the western philoshophers advocate is a “pure westernised economy” That’s where the “Wester media” and all comes into play.
///So when you add it all up, for China to get its way on development, it needs to be friends with the Americans, the Europeans, the Muslims, and the Slavs. Doesn’t exactly leave a whole lot of civilizations to clash with, does it?\\\
I see this statement as an innocent hope by Barnett to see China begging for the “friendship” of Americans and Europeans. :-)
When China started their development plans with double figure growth rates, every western country laughed at them. They thought it’s impossible for a Asian country like China to achieve double figure economic growth rates, without the help of western world. But they did!
Like wise, in the future China will well achieve their development targets without seeking help from western world. I don’t know how. But they will. 20 years ago no one knew “how” China going to achive double figure economic growth, but they did it some how. Again, Barnett see the world with “wall street financing” “Crude Oil base energy” etc. But who knows? China may come up with new engergy solutions! New definitions for capital financing.
Ok, I’m going too far away. Key to highlight is, Barnett’s views are biased towards the conventional western philosophy of defining development and economy.
(Is there any Google book search extracts for this book? Will search)
Hmmmm.. Correct me if i’m wrong.. The reasons for A9 being closed are too.. lets say.. not that much.. of a reason. All this time I thought the A9 was closed because it’s the only road on which the fuel trucks can reach the north? Basically the only roads on which these fuel trucks can go, while easily ambushed, jacked, raped, humped etc etc.. our locos also manage to give free fuel while travelling etc etc.. Since fuel is such a role player in this war I thought this might be the reason for the A9 being closed.. Oh well.. everyhting adds to a decision I suppose.
Hmmm…
Indi, you should consider submitting some of these stuff for print media. They could use some fresh perspectives.
I read this article some time ago, titled ‘defeating terrorism through capitalism’ (or something to that effect) I can’t quite recall the specifics but the title somehow struck me. If nothing else, that’s what the CFA brought to the people of NE, economic stability and optimism through (and largely due to) opening of the A9.
terrorism prospers in poverty, and providing the NE with economic stability is large part of solving this puzzle.
I don’t intend to engage on a side-track argument but lot of the observations by VIC on china, and the colonial vandalism is misplaced. It’s a pipe dream to believe that china can move in the world without interaction with the western world, more than anyone the Chinese knows this. Further it’s stupid to wait around for our former colonial masters to pay up, and besides if you really think about it, they left us in much better shape than the shit-hole we have dug ourselves into. If you want a modern example take a long hard look at Hong Kong. Its time to stop complaining and start moving ahead, like Singapore and (at least some parts of) India,
There is a great reluctance in the Sri Lankan polity, and people in general to accept blame. Woes of this country are created, bread and prospered by people and politicians of this country not by mean old western powers.
Mr.Evil – I don’t claim to fully comprehend the reasons behind the closure of A9 but if it was oil trucks then they could have always been stopped at the FDLs and other goods passed. people who belive that A9 Closure is leading us closer to resolution of this conflict are sadly mistaken.
I haven’t had a chance to read the book but have skimmed through Barnett’s Esquire article. I get the sense that what Barnett is proposing is his “commonsense model” rather than something that can actually be used to understand how the world works. From my cursory view, I think his model is a static one that other than clubbing some nations into pigeon-holes is not able to explain how a country moves from one category to another over time. The criteria that he uses to club the countries is ambiguous and subjective enough that it would result in a totally different set based on who applies them. Even at the common-sense level I have a hard time understanding how waging a war in Iraq would make the world more “connected” and bring order, rules, institutions, capitalism etc to Iraq thanks to America’s “engagement” with that country. Empirically, we see just the opposite taking shape. Thanks to American intervention, that region is inexorably moving towards chaos rather than order. On this subject, I find Fukayama’s take more persuasive: http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=FA071EF6395A0C7A8DDDAB0894DE404482
I am cynical enough to believe that foreign policy of a country should be driven by its national interest rather than some “do-gooder” philosophy. Currently the US administration would be hard-pressed to define how its national interest is served by its action not only in Iraq, but also in a number of other regions in the world.
I totally agree with you on that. Closing the A9 is just a way for a few people who are connected to politics to make a buck by transporting people over water. The war is still a business for some, then again every situation is about power, money or fame & Recognition.. But sometimes I wonder what those things are.. that us normal people dont know But people in the higher ranks may know.
The Esquire article is unfortunate because the Bush Administration totally cocked-up the Iraq War. For example, the Iraqis have less electricity and security than before, meaning the US hasn’t made much effort to pointing them towards the Core (i.e., reconstruction). The Esquire article was written in the heady days before the war, before the Bush Admin displayed the arrogant incompetence of Katrina and beyond.
In his book and his blog he has acknowledged that the Iraq War has gone pear-shaped on the latter (more important) point, as has everyone from the Military Times to Richard Perle. Despite the incompetence of the Bush Administration, however, Globalization is still a force that brings security and it does need to move forward. America had a chance in Iraq and they screwed it up. It doesn’t mean that ‘doing good’ is bad, in fact it is necessary for future security.
While the methods of Rumsfeld & co have cocked up the war in Iraq, the war itself was certainly driven by national interest rather than a do-gooder mentality. Primarily to remove the US dependence on Saudi oil, thereby removing Saudi Arabia’s ability to dictate regional policies as well as as dictate policy to the US. There’s no doubt that the securing of the Iraqi oilfields is in the US national interest. Rumsfeld & Cheney have fought the war badly, but it doesn’t change the positive reasons for going to war in the first place.
Barnett would like us to believe that if America “reconnects” Iraq by “engaging” it, it would transform the Middle East and make the world a better place. I believe that should not be reason enough for America to stake the lives of its
citizens. Although “making the world a better place” would be propounded by the spin-masters as the prime driver for going to war, the US administration should know what its real interests in Iraq are and how they can be secured. In his first presidential election campaign, Bush Jr. was very emphatic that the US should not be in the business of nation-building. But that is exactly what they are doing now. Was going to war and dismantling the existing structures in Iraq the way to secure its energy supplies? I think not. Since the war, oil prices have gone through the roof (though temporarily down), output from the oil wells is no where near where the US administration predicted they would be, I don’t see an end to the current insurrection any time soon, the weak governance structures are inviting all kinds of forces from Iran, Syria and from afar to fill the vacuum and make merry in this chaos, Iraq is a recruitment poster for al quaeda and I can go on and on. Basically, Iraq is not a project that has gone awry, it was a disaster from the start thanks to the arrogance of the New-cons who believed in social engineering on a global scale.
Barnett’s entire thesis is America-centric–core and gaps are defined in terms of what regions the USA chooses to engage. He himself acknowledges the tautology in his conception and although the connectivity issues is interesting, the rest of his analysis lacks rigor (based on the Esquire article. May be he does a good job in the book).
cheers,
I apologize for the long posting below which are the last two sections from Fukuyama’s article in the NYT (that requires a payment to view this article) based on his new book. I think his comments are very pertinent to the current discussion.
After Neoconservatism (NYT Feb 19, 2006)
[…]
The Failure of Benevolent Hegemony
The Bush administration and its neoconservative supporters did not simply underestimate the difficulty of bringing about congenial political outcomes in places like Iraq; they also misunderstood the way the world would react to the use of American power. Of course, the cold war was replete with instances of what the foreign policy analyst Stephen Sestanovich calls American maximalism, wherein Washington acted first and sought legitimacy and support from its allies only after the fact. But in the post-cold-war period, the structural situation of world politics changed in ways that made this kind of exercise of power much more problematic in the eyes of even close allies. After the fall of the Soviet Union, various neoconservative authors like Charles Krauthammer, William Kristol and Robert Kagan suggested that the United States would use its margin of power to exert a kind of “benevolent hegemony” over the rest of the world, fixing problems like rogue states with W.M.D., human rights abuses and terrorist threats as they came up. Writing before the Iraq war, Kristol and Kagan considered whether this posture would provoke resistance from the rest of the world, and concluded, “It is precisely because American foreign policy is infused with an unusually high degree of morality that other nations find they have less to fear from its otherwise daunting power.” (Italics added.)
It is hard to read these lines without irony in the wake of the global reaction to the Iraq war, which succeeded in uniting much of the world in a frenzy of anti-Americanism. The idea that the United States is a hegemon more benevolent than most is not an absurd one, but there were warning signs that things had changed in America’s relationship to the world long before the start of the Iraq war. The structural imbalance in global power had grown enormous. America surpassed the rest of the world in every dimension of power by an unprecedented margin, with its defense spending nearly equal to that of the rest of the world combined. Already during the Clinton years, American economic hegemony had generated enormous hostility to an American-dominated process of globalization, frequently on the part of close democratic allies who thought the United States was seeking to impose its antistatist social model on them.
There were other reasons as well why the world did not accept American benevolent hegemony. In the first place, it was premised on American exceptionalism, the idea that America could use its power in instances where others could not because it was more virtuous than other countries. The doctrine of pre-emption against terrorist threats contained in the 2002 National Security Strategy was one that could not safely be generalized through the international system; America would be the first country to object if Russia, China, India or France declared a similar right of unilateral action. The United States was seeking to pass judgment on others while being unwilling to have its own conduct questioned in places like the International Criminal Court.
Another problem with benevolent hegemony was domestic. There are sharp limits to the American people’s attention to foreign affairs and willingness to finance projects overseas that do not have clear benefits to American interests. Sept. 11 changed that calculus in many ways, providing popular support for two wars in the Middle East and large increases in defense spending. But the durability of the support is uncertain: although most Americans want to do what is necessary to make the project of rebuilding Iraq succeed, the aftermath of the invasion did not increase the public appetite for further costly interventions. Americans are not, at heart, an imperial people. Even benevolent hegemons sometimes have to act ruthlessly, and they need a staying power that does not come easily to people who are reasonably content with their own lives and society.
Finally, benevolent hegemony presumed that the hegemon was not only well intentioned but competent as well. Much of the criticism of the Iraq intervention from Europeans and others was not based on a normative case that the United States was not getting authorization from the United Nations Security Council, but rather on the belief that it had not made an adequate case for invading Iraq in the first place and didn’t know what it was doing in trying to democratize Iraq. In this, the critics were unfortunately quite prescient.
The most basic misjudgment was an overestimation of the threat facing the United States from radical Islamism. Although the new and ominous possibility of undeterrable terrorists armed with weapons of mass destruction did indeed present itself, advocates of the war wrongly conflated this with the threat presented by Iraq and with the rogue state/proliferation problem more generally. The misjudgment was based in part on the massive failure of the American intelligence community to correctly assess the state of Iraq’s W.M.D. programs before the war. But the intelligence community never took nearly as alarmist a view of the terrorist/W.M.D. threat as the war’s supporters did. Overestimation of this threat was then used to justify the elevation of preventive war to the centerpiece of a new security strategy, as well as a whole series of measures that infringed on civil liberties, from detention policy to domestic eavesdropping.
What to Do
Now that the neoconservative moment appears to have passed, the United States needs to reconceptualize its foreign policy in several fundamental ways. In the first instance, we need to demilitarize what we have been calling the global war on terrorism and shift to other types of policy instruments. We are fighting hot counterinsurgency wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and against the international jihadist movement, wars in which we need to prevail. But “war” is the wrong metaphor for the broader struggle, since wars are fought at full intensity and have clear beginnings and endings. Meeting the jihadist challenge is more of a “long, twilight struggle” whose core is not a military campaign but a political contest for the hearts and minds of ordinary Muslims around the world. As recent events in France and Denmark suggest, Europe will be a central battleground in this fight.
The United States needs to come up with something better than “coalitions of the willing” to legitimate its dealings with other countries. The world today lacks effective international institutions that can confer legitimacy on collective action; creating new organizations that will better balance the dual requirements of legitimacy and effectiveness will be the primary task for the coming generation. As a result of more than 200 years of political evolution, we have a relatively good understanding of how to create institutions that are rulebound, accountable and reasonably effective in the vertical silos we call states. What we do not have are adequate mechanisms of horizontal accountability among states.
The conservative critique of the United Nations is all too cogent: while useful for certain peacekeeping and nation-building operations, the United Nations lacks both democratic legitimacy and effectiveness in dealing with serious security issues. The solution is not to strengthen a single global body, but rather to promote what has been emerging in any event, a “multi-multilateral world” of overlapping and occasionally competing international institutions that are organized on regional or functional lines. Kosovo in 1999 was a model: when the Russian veto prevented the Security Council from acting, the United States and its NATO allies simply shifted the venue to NATO, where the Russians could not block action.
The final area that needs rethinking, and the one that will be the most contested in the coming months and years, is the place of democracy promotion in American foreign policy. The worst legacy that could come from the Iraq war would be an anti-neoconservative backlash that coupled a sharp turn toward isolation with a cynical realist policy aligning the United States with friendly authoritarians. Good governance, which involves not just democracy but also the rule of law and economic development, is critical to a host of outcomes we desire, from alleviating poverty to dealing with pandemics to controlling violent conflicts. A Wilsonian policy that pays attention to how rulers treat their citizens is therefore right, but it needs to be informed by a certain realism that was missing from the thinking of the Bush administration in its first term and of its neoconservative allies.
We need in the first instance to understand that promoting democracy and modernization in the Middle East is not a solution to the problem of jihadist terrorism; in all likelihood it will make the short-term problem worse, as we have seen in the case of the Palestinian election bringing Hamas to power. Radical Islamism is a byproduct of modernization itself, arising from the loss of identity that accompanies the transition to a modern, pluralist society. It is no accident that so many recent terrorists, from Sept. 11’s Mohamed Atta to the murderer of the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh to the London subway bombers, were radicalized in democratic Europe and intimately familiar with all of democracy’s blessings. More democracy will mean more alienation, radicalization and — yes, unfortunately — terrorism.
But greater political participation by Islamist groups is very likely to occur whatever we do, and it will be the only way that the poison of radical Islamism can ultimately work its way through the body politic of Muslim communities around the world. The age is long since gone when friendly authoritarians could rule over passive populations and produce stability indefinitely. New social actors are mobilizing everywhere, from Bolivia and Venezuela to South Africa and the Persian Gulf. A durable Israeli-Palestinian peace could not be built upon a corrupt, illegitimate Fatah that constantly had to worry about Hamas challenging its authority. Peace might emerge, sometime down the road, from a Palestine run by a formerly radical terrorist group that had been forced to deal with the realities of governing.
If we are serious about the good governance agenda, we have to shift our focus to the reform, reorganization and proper financing of those institutions of the United States government that actually promote democracy, development and the rule of law around the world, organizations like the State Department, U.S.A.I.D., the National Endowment for Democracy and the like. The United States has played an often decisive role in helping along many recent democratic transitions, including in the Philippines in 1986; South Korea and Taiwan in 1987; Chile in 1988; Poland and Hungary in 1989; Serbia in 2000; Georgia in 2003; and Ukraine in 2004-5. But the overarching lesson that emerges from these cases is that the United States does not get to decide when and where democracy comes about. By definition, outsiders can’t “impose” democracy on a country that doesn’t want it; demand for democracy and reform must be domestic. Democracy promotion is therefore a long-term and opportunistic process that has to await the gradual ripening of political and economic conditions to be effective.
The Bush administration has been walking — indeed, sprinting — away from the legacy of its first term, as evidenced by the cautious multilateral approach it has taken toward the nuclear programs of Iran and North Korea. Condoleezza Rice gave a serious speech in January about “transformational diplomacy” and has begun an effort to reorganize the nonmilitary side of the foreign-policy establishment, and the National Security Strategy document is being rewritten. All of these are welcome changes, but the legacy of the Bush first-term foreign policy and its neoconservative supporters has been so polarizing that it is going to be hard to have a reasoned debate about how to appropriately balance American ideals and interests in the coming years. The reaction against a flawed policy can be as damaging as the policy itself, and such a reaction is an indulgence we cannot afford, given the critical moment we have arrived at in global politics.
Neoconservatism, whatever its complex roots, has become indelibly associated with concepts like coercive regime change, unilateralism and American hegemony. What is needed now are new ideas, neither neoconservative nor realist, for how America is to relate to the rest of the world — ideas that retain the neoconservative belief in the universality of human rights, but without its illusions about the efficacy of American power and hegemony to bring these ends about.
Francis Fukuyama teaches at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. This essay is adapted from his book “America at the Crossroads,” which will be published this month by Yale University Press.