I’m about half finished reading the full-length book version of Thomas Barnett’s The Pentagon’s New Map. It’s an easy read and very thought-provoking. I’ll post my observations in some detail when I’ve finished reading it (at the rate I’m going that should be in a day or so).
Reading the book has made me start thinking again about something that’s been sadly missing in the presidential campaign—a vision for the future. I’ve heard a lot of promises, policies, and, well, bloviations but no clear and compelling vision from either candidate.
It’s pretty easy to come up with future prospects that you absolutely don’t want to come to pass. I don’t want a future in which every few months or every few years another American city is vaporized by a terrorist-set nuclear weapon. I don’t want a future in which America reduces the Middle East to a radioactive roller skating rink. I don’t want a future in which wages for the average person in this country stagnate or fall to the level of a Pakistani bricklayer. And I don’t want a future in which paying the medical bills for an accident or catastrophic illness reduces me (or anyone else for that matter) to penury.
But coming up with an appealing future—a future worth striving for—is a lot harder. Barnett is a relentless optimist. He has a future vision of the integrated Core nations uniting to bring the non-integrating Gap nations into a future Core whose citizens are becoming healthier, living longer, becoming more prosperous, and are happier and freer.
Although I can’t claim to share Barnett’s optimism, that’s a future I’d like to see, too.
What about you?
You might read this on Bush’s vision.
I think the Bush team is doing exactly what Barnett would want, but instinctively, rather than with a clear roadmap. Which is what happened in the Cold War. We were global policemen promoting order and economic growth to try to stymie the Soviets. but the result was Globalization.
Now the adminisration is trying to do something very much like “closing the Gap,” but as a weapon against ME terror. Barnett himself has said that this is the right first step.
So why does he endorse Kerry? I think his stated reasons are phony. I suspect that, like many people right now, he can’t admit that the liberal culture he grew up in has become reactionary, and the true liberals are now Republicans.
There’s no rational reason to think Kerry would would be a passionate Gap-closer….
John Weidner, I suspect you’re pretty close to the mark in second-guessing Barnett’s rationale for endorsing Kerry. I’m a registered Democrat myself and although I’ve voted in every election for the last 30 years I’ve never voted for a Republican. So I know that the “Republicans are evil&148; idea is bred in the bone of many Democrats. But my mom is a died-in-the-wool Republican so I can see, shall we say, the limitations on that idea.
You might be interested in my take on Barnett’s endorsement.