The Current Crop of Candidates

[Urbane Guerrilla]

What Thomas P.M. Barnett thinks future Presidents should be doing: Recasting the Long War as a Joint Sino-American Venture.

Exerpted:

In this so-called long war against the global jihadist movement, the Bush administration’s greatest failure has been its lack of strategic imagination. It has added the right enemies to our to-do list, but failed to enlist the necessary new allies, giving our people the misperception that it’s America against the world.

This need not be the case. Our natural allies are now located on the frontiers of globalization, or among the three billion-plus new capitalists who joined global markets over the last generation, chiefly among them the Chinese.

The integrating core of globalization—namely the old West plus the emerging markets of the East and South—have effectively outsourced the global policing function to the United States by refusing to balance our immense warfighting and power projection capabilities with their own. Instead, Western Europe focuses on economically integrating the former Soviet bloc, while rising titans like China and India, for reasons of rising energy requirements, focus overwhelmingly on integrating—on relatively narrow terms—resource providers located in those regions least connected to the global economy, or what I call globalization’s non-integrating gap (e.g., the Caribbean rim, Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia, and the southeast Asian littoral states).

Not surprisingly, the Pentagon’s new map in this long war corresponds greatly to those gap regions, for there we find the preponderance of “moderate” dictators, rogue regimes, and failed states, all of whom either attract the attention of transnational terrorists or support their activities for their own nefarious reasons. Viewed in this light, our victory is logically defined as the successful building out of globalization’s core and the simultaneous shrinking—or successful economic integration—of those gap regions. As we’ve seen in Afghanistan
and Iraq, this is no mean task and one that generates significant labor requirements.

So I say, locate the labor where the problem is.

This isn't new stuff from Barnett, but the whole article is a concise summing up.