Zenpundit has posted his next two examinations of Dr. Thomas Barnett’s deleted Scene on System Perturbation, Section III here and Section IV here.
I continue to find Dr. Barnett’s notion of an integrated Core and a non-integrating Gap perplexing. How long has there been a Core? What is its history? If it existed a hundred years ago, what were the then-Core’s rule-sets? How have the rule-sets changed over time?
Why, instead of discrete Core and Gap, isn’t there a spectrum of Core-integration with countries being more-integrated and less-integrated over time? Why does the rule-set seem so binary?
And shouldn’t there be some meta-rules for the Core rule-set? I would really like to see examples of each of these rules in action. And, more importantly, methods of testing whether a specific rule is actually in force. Without standards for specifically disproving each rule aren’t we looking at self-defining tautologies?
Take Rule #9, for example:
The potential for conflict is maximized when states with differing rule sets are forced into collaboration/collision/clashes.
Do any two states actually have the same rule set? How do you measure it? It would seem to me that, once again, we are always dealing with a spectrum of degrees of congruity between rule-sets rather than an equivalence/non-equivalence situation.
When we look up into the sky at the clouds we may see patterns there. Horses, people, rabbits, any of a million things. But anyone who has flown through a cloud bank in an airplane knows that there are no horses, people, or rabbits there. The sky is there. The clouds are there. The moisture that actually comprises the clouds are there. But the patterns aren’t. And yet it is our nature, the essential quality of our minds, to find patterns in the clouds and see the horses, people, and rabbits.
I’ve watched Barnett’s original modest and appropriate insight evolve into a System – not to mention an Income Stream. I stopped paying a lot of attention to him about the time his lectures became media events, with professionally produced backdrops and TV taping for later broadcast.
One of the things I admired about Herman Kahn when he was a live was that he never became a prisoner of his own insights and analyses — nor did he turn them into a System. Kahn’s influence as a defense and international affairs analyst can be measured by the fact that many of his books from the 60s and 70s are still in print.
Barnett doesn’t quite rise to that level of stature IMO.
You aren’t paying sufficient attention to what Dr. Barnett is actually saying. His famous map of Core and Gap is explicitly not 100% accurate but rather a line drawn at a “95% confidence level”. Since N. Korea is not part of the Gap on the map, it’s pretty clear that we’re not talking 100% accurate, binary black and white stuff as you accuse him of doing.
In fact, Dr. Barnett does provide something of a spectrum in talking about Old Core, New Core, Seam, and Gap states. Old Core states are ones which even a couple of pro-Gap administrations couldn’t wrench the country out of the Core, it’s already too entangled for that. New Core states are more susceptible to bouts of bad government changing their status, Seam states could go either way, and then there are the Gap states which are thinly connected. I guess you could subdivide that into hopeful gap and committed gap to differentiate between a case like N. Korea and Libya but I don’t know how much of an analytical boost you get out of that.
A lot of the reason why Dr. Barnett is so vague is that he’s running along horizontally over ground that will be mined by thousands of vertical thinkers, deeply developing his concepts to fit their particular niche. I would never have thought of applying the Core/Gap framework to the inner-city underclass but apparently it’s starting to get very popular with some municipal police chiefs and how they think about improving high-crime neighborhoods and high-crime populations.
Dr. Barnett is never going to “get” the vertical details right everywhere. In fact, he’s very likely going to get them wrong much of the time. To be as good at broad horizontal thinking and at all the deep vertical implications such theories have requires a renaissance man, something that hasn’t been seen in real life for hundreds of years. The guy’s good but he’s not superhuman.
The kind of numerical scale spectrum analysis requires an awful lot of data gathering, comparative analysis, and wise judgment about what is important. Is the differing rule set between napoleonic code law and common law significant? Sure it is but how important is it? Building codes, firefighting codes, systems of measurement, electrical voltage rules, telephony regulations, all these things are rulesets that do, at the margin, spill over into broader conflicts. The number of rulesets is huge though and the incremental impact of each is usually tiny. Is it realistic to expect one professor to do such data gathering alone? I don’t think so.
On the other hand, the entire Core/Gap stuff started from some real data gathering, that where we send our military overseas tends to be in what became to be known as Gap states. That pattern is real. If you think that the correlation is without any meaningful causative links, that it’s just an interesting coincidence, that’s your right. I can’t come up with an alternate explanation for it. Can you?
Robin,
To follow up on TM;
You are comparing Dr. Barnett at what seems to be the start of his career as a grand strategist with Herman Kahn’s entire career. That’s a pretty high bar to say the least.
Secondly while PNM is a systemic analysis it’s a remarkably open system, not a rigid, closed, one. I don’t think that PNM was ever intended to be the *only* way to look at the world – just a flexible and adaptive strategy to tackle international security problems