Review of: Barnett, Thomas M.P. Blueprint for Action: A Future Worth Creating. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2005.

            Blueprint for Action: A Future Worth Creating is the more detailed strategy for resolving the problems identified in Barnett’s first book about his prime thesis, The Pentagon’s New Map. The thesis behind the title of the New Map is that the matrix of globalization, political institution building, interdependent trade, commerce, and finance, and the “connectivity” provided by information technology has created a Functioning Core of modern 21^st century countries in three-fourths of the globe. This Core is stable, relatively war free, prosperous, and plugged into the advantages of technology, education, and enterprise. In the other one-quarter of the world–running from South and Central America, through most of Africa, Southeast Europe, the Middle East, and Central and Southeast Asia–there is a Non-Integrating Gap of countries unconnected to modern thought, tools, and opportunities as found in the Functioning Core of Barnett’s New Map.

            Whereas the Core has all the advantages of liberal politics and market economics, the Gap is prone to war, disease, genocide, poverty, famine, ignorance, oppression, tyranny, and dictatorship. This Gap part of the New Map has been the scene for almost of all of the conflicts and human catastrophes since the end of World War II in 1945. Barnett believes, and possibly rightly, that the Gap countries will continue to be areas of the globe that will see civil, ethnic, sectarian, national, regional, great power and world struggle in the future. These struggles, as they did in the Cold War confrontation through the proxy adventures of U.S. and Soviet aggression, and as they have done since the end of the U.S.S.R. at the end of 1991, will draw in many countries from around the world into conflicts of politics, economics, cultures, and societies.

            These conflicts, as they have always done, will create mass human suffering, ecological disaster, economic turmoil, diplomatic tension, and outright war in the future. These wars, as they have already done in the last six decades, will use or threaten the use of massively destructive weapons. In Barnett’s thesis, as long as this “other” world remains weak internally and externally against the dangers of all forms of enemies, the future of the Non-Integrating Gap is misery, destruction, and death. That is, unless something happens to bring the personal liberty, economic freedom, stable institutions, and community “connectedness” to the Gap.

            Herein is the major reason for this second book, Blueprint for Action. The blueprint is Barnett’s suggestion of a U.S. grand strategy to lead a world-wide alliance which systematically shrinks the Gap, country by country, connecting them to the 21^st century, until the dire danger to world peace presented by the Gap’s “backwardness” is removed. This proposal is nothing more than a call for the “humanitarian” intervention in the overthrow of national governments by a Leviathon military force (so named after the large creature in the Old Testament) through preventive invasion. This Leviathon force, which is mostly the United States and NATO, would then move onto the next country on the regional target list. Unlike the post-invasion plan for Iraq, the rest of the world in a unified Systems Administration force (SysAdmin) would assume sovereign control of the occupied country. This SysAdmin force would be the militaries of second-tier powers, constabulary and paramilitary forces, civilian outsourced personnel and government and international civil servants. The country under occupation would be rebuilt, reordered, “freed,” and connected to the principles and advantages of the Functioning Core, and then turned over to a trained, and apparently obedient, national government.

            The real implication of Barnett’s prescription, even if his diagnosis of “unconnectedness” proves correct, is the smacking of the colonial and imperial “white man’s burden” of 19^th and 20^th European empires seeking to remake the “aboriginal” peoples of the world into better off people. Then, such better-off ideas were accomplished through religious conversion, legal near-slavery, economic exploitation, and foreign rule. Barnett is basically saying that the people in the Non-Integrating Gap and their leaders cannot be trusted to make necessary changes in their countries to prevent human catastrophe. This may be true enough for the dictating leaders, who have been nonetheless supported and financed by Western “democratic” nations. But even more sadly, Barnett believes that the only way to shrink the Gap, to connect those countries, and prevent war, disease, etc., is through the blatant use of force.

            After four years of the U.S. attempting this very same policy of shrinking the Gap in international relations that was Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, and all the attendant U.S. failures and poor policy decisions, can it even be assumed anymore that such a policy of war to prevent war, which is the major logic in Blueprint for Action, be more successful anywhere else? Not just in the Middle East, but, as Barnett proposes, around the entire southern hemisphere landmasses? One wonders if the old “white” world and the new budding imperialist in the “rich world” have not really thought out the grand strategy of this before Operation Iraqi Freedom, before Enduring Freedom, or even before 9/11. It certainly sounds like a blueprint for action of a militarized peace through killing, the fear of killing, and an elite in world affairs reserving decisions for themselves, and probably in their own interest.