Thomas P.M. Barnett is one of my new favorites in the policy arena today. The author of The Pentagon's New Map, Barnett has worked for the Pentagon and for Cantor-Fitzgerald, among others, and is one of those people who makes sense when he speaks - a rarity for a policy elite often too steeped deep in their own jargon and langauge.
In a recent CSPAN presentation, Barnett said something that resonated pretty deeply with me.
Okay - he said a lot of things that resonated deeply with me. But this is one that I'm writing about now.
In talking about Spain and the terrorist attacks there, Barnett had the following to say:
You have to work across the core to improve the ability to withstand and mitigate 9/11-like "System Perturbations", vertical shocks to the system. So if you can buy an election in Spain with ten backpack bombs, they're gonna keep trying, till you show 'em, "It doesn't matter." You can deal with this. You gotta preserve the core to grow the core. You gotta discreetly firewall the core from the gap's worst exports (pandemics, narcotics, terror). Shrink the gap by exporting security to the worst security sinkholes located there.
Barnett's talking about a global security ruleset that, frankly, makes a lot of sense despite the implications it has for the export of American security services to what he calls the "Gap", a core set of geographic areas that represent American security concerns for the current times, most of which are in the Middle East, Africa and Asia.
But even outside of the foreign and security policy implications, Barnett's theories make a lot of sense for domestic issues as well. As Barnett himself states, there isn't a conflict in the world today that hasn't occurred in the United States on an internal level before, be it genocide, war, religious violence or terrorism. So it stands to reason that the current geopolitical climate has its parallels in either America's past, present or future.
You gotta preserve the core to grow the core.
In an interview on the radio show Democracy Now!, Donna Brazille lamented about the lack of attention from the Kerry campaign to its base, the liberals and progressives in the Democratic Party. They focused on the swing voters far too much, she said, and not enough on the base. The Deaniacs, from what I can tell, have much the same complaint and these are the people that want modern, non-establishment people like Dean or Rosenberg to become the next chair of the DNC.
The complaint is a valid one. In writing for the The Chronicle, John Lukacs says:
It has become a Bad Word for millions of Americans. Confident that a large majority of the American people have come to regard, see, or hear the adjective "liberal" as definitely pejorative, the president of the United States found it proper and useful to affix it to his opponent in campaign speeches day after day, across this vast country. Meanwhile, his opponent thought it best not to identify himself as a liberal.
This accusatory label is reminiscent of the habit of some political speakers 50 years ago who declared that their opponents were "Communists" or "Communist sympathizers." Such a similarity, while not precise, is at least interesting, since the increasingly rapid fall of the popularity of "liberal" began just about 50 years ago.
We've all seen the electorate map. We all know that thirty-two states voted red. We've all heard the talk of the Democratic Party becoming an "18-state Party". And we've all wondered why the red states would vote against their own self-interest. And we've wondered how to bring them around.
It's the "how" that's relevant to this post. And the answer - or part of it, anyway, is in Barnett's quote. "You gotta preserve the core to grow the core."
The calls for a reorganization and a re-thinking of the Democratic Party's structure and leadership are only a part of that equation. For me, it's not so much an issue of which party takes the White House; at their core, there are principles to be liked in both parties. What is an issue for me is what policies govern our legislative, judicial and executive agendas for America. Right now, it seems to me that the liberals and the progressives have the right of it and Barnett's arguments regarding the rulesets and solutions that affect the current geopolitical and geosecurity climate are just as valid for our domestic policy issues as well.
So what's this mean? Two things, if we are to apply Barnett's solution sets.
1. We have to refocus our attention on our base. We have to make it more immune to systemic, vertical shocks like the loss of a Presidential election or the persistent mocking of our principles by our political opposition. If we build that base and make it unshakeable, persuade the opposition that "It doesn't matter", we can deal with these shocks.
2. We have to export rulesets from the Blue to the Red. Barnett's argument is that the nations in the "gap" cannot create indigenously the rulesets required for successful globalization. The functioning core of globalization, Barnett says, encompasses countries that comprise 4 billion out of a global population of 6.3 billion, a core that functions just fine without American military intervention. Connectivity and the ability to handle content flow is thick in these areas, which Barnett, perhaps unconsciously, labels "Blue". But in the "Red" areas, connectivity is low.
No matter how you measure connectivity, it's thinner in the Red. People movement, idea movement, goods movement, services movement, fibre-optic cable laid - no matter how you measure it, it's thicker in the Blue than it is in the Red. So if you're fighting against the content flows associated with globalization, it's a little too much for traditional societies. You'd like to slow it down, maybe keep it out altogether. Or you don't have the robust legal rulesets, the design, to attract foreign direct investment (FDI) that leads to serious integration.
Sound familiar, anyone? Take out the globalization and FDI and he might as well be talking about some of our red states.
What this means, though, is that we have got to start exporting the rulesets that have made blue states like NY and CA the economic powerhouses that they are into the red states. Granted, this is easier said than done and the devil does lie in the details of the "how", but at least this theory gives us a direction to proceed in, which is more than we can say about the pre-November-2 Democratic Party.
...
But we know all of this. Many progressives have already articulated this since November 2. So why harp on it again? What's the point of adding another "Yes, me too!" voice to the din?
Here's the point: The parallels I draw between Barnett's arguments and the progressive calls for reform serve to highlight the relevance between our own domestic policy agendas and the current geopolitical climate.
It isn't just us. We aren't the only ones going through this tumult. The rest of the world mirrors our issues as we do theirs. We are as much a microcosm for the entire planet as the planet's issues are a macrocosm for ours.
Consider this food for further thought - or just another voice in the din.
I just thought the parallels were cool.