GLOBALIZATION

I managed to finish two books on globalization, each with a different emphasis. Thomas Friedman's The World is Flat focuses more on the economy and social issues. Thomas P.M. Barnett's The Pentagon's New Map analyzes the role of the U.S. military in adjusting to the new world most people see created by 9/11 (but it is clear trends were already moving toward 9/11 a decade or so earlier). Since Barnett dealt more with the political/military/diplomatic situation, I think it is a book anyone interested in history and political science would find plenty of food for thought. I am convinced that the world is in the midst of a major epochal change which is probably why I enjoyed each of these books.

Among the points I liked in Barnett's book (although I don't necessarily agree with all of them):

p. 3: “Amazingly, the U.S. military engaged in more crisis-response activity around the world in the 1990s than in an previous decade of the Cold War, yet no national vision arose to explain our expanding role.”

p. 4: “. . .the Pentagon spent the nineties buying a far different military—one best suited for a high-tech war against a large, very sophisticated military opponent. In short, our military strategists dreamed of an opponent that would not arise for a war that no longer existed.”

p. 19: “Until September 11, 2001, we basically had no reproducible strategic concepts to guide our use of military power.”

p. 20: on policymakers: “. . .most of those policymakers are neck-deep in day-to-day management issues and are rarely able to step back from their never-ending schedule of fifteen-minute office calls to actually contemplate the big-picture question of Why?”

p. 23: “The fewer the rules, the more war you have.” “Throughout the 1990s, the Pentagon lurched from Somalia to Haiti to Bosnia to Kosovo, and it did so without the slightest understanding why.”

p. 25: “Doesn’t it seem weird that the same senators who prattle on during Sunday news programs about the world is a chaotic, unpredictable place still always seem to show up on C-SPAN following some security disaster to decry yet another “intelligence failure”?”

p. 27: “I believe that history will judge the 1990s much like the Roaring Twenties—just a little too good to be true. Both decades threw the major rule sets out of whack: . . .”

p. 30: “. . .I prefer comparing George W. Bush to Harry Truman rather than Ronald Reagan.”

p. 32: “While the world’s population has doubled since 1960, the percentage living in poverty has been cut in half.”

p. 38: “. . .President Richard Nixon and eventual Secretary of State Henry Kissinger—looking at the Soviets more like a global mafia we could tolerate rather than Nazis we needed to exterminate.” “Cold War really ended in 1973 and not in 1989”

p. 40: “MAD was a stroke of sheer brilliance on McNamara’s part, . . .“

p. 44: “The eight-year period 1987-1994 saw 9,575 global casualties from terrorism, but over the next nine years (1995-2003), the total jumped to 27, 608.”

p. 49: disconnectedness is the problem, not Islam, etc. – disconnected nations need to be connected to globalization

p. 94: “Since we could not easily track down the individual terrorist spread across this global network, we did the one thing we know how to do well: we invaded a nation-state.”

p. 96: “. . .light leadership touch displayed by the Clinton Administration for eight years.” “Bush Administration felt that they had to reestablish civilian control over the military when they came into power in 2001.”

p. 140: “So I added up all the response days, and the results ere rather striking: the Middle East was already accounting for more than half of all the four services’ cumulative response days in the 1980s, with the percentage rising to 75 percent for the Navy and Marine Corps. More important, the cumulative number of response days for all four services was rising over time. There were not that many more individual operations in the 1980s than in the 1970s (an increase of only 20 percent). It was just that the responses in the 1980s were getting a lot longer, so the total number of response days increased by roughly 70 percent.”

p. 141: On defense budget: “If underequipped troops are sent overseas for crisis response, Congress does not catch the blame, the White House does. . .”

p. 178: “we are never leaving the Gap”

p. 200: “Growing economies generally beget happy societies. . .”


p. 217: Arab states would have had to invent an Israel if none existed

p. 218: “In 1980, the Middle East accounted for 13 percent of global exports. Today that share is 3 percent, with the overwhelming bulk being oil and natural gas. A generation ago, the Middle East attracted 5 percent of the global flow of foreign direct investment. Today that number is a mere 1.5 percent.”

p. 219: “When competing against countries that aggressively educate their populations, countries with large natural endowments will lose every time.”

p. 238: added up crisis response days: 1970s – 10,415 total days (not including Vietnam); 1980s – 17,382 days (increase of 66 percent); 1990s – 66,930 days

p. 239: “Of the thirty-seven major conflicts spread around the world in the 1990s, thirty-four occurred in countries with annual per capita GDP totals of less than $2,936.”

p. 244: “The share of total investment in the U.S. economy that is financed by foreign sources now reaches close to 20 percent, while in the 1970s that shre rarely rose above 5 percent.”

p. 298: America’s task – global bodyguard

p. 299: America accounts for about half of entire world’s state spending on defense

p. 309: “When America turned its back on the world following World War I, the globalization it inevitably helped destroy was largely of Europe’s creation. But the globalization of today is largely of America’s creation.”

p. 317: America’s military response to 9/11 “pathetic”; “Pentagon completely unprepared to fight in Afghanistan”

p. 347: “The general magnitude of global warfare has decreased by over fifty percent since peaking in the mid-1980s, falling by the end of 2002 to its lowest level since the early 1960s.” “today’s level is still 16 percent less than it was in the late 1980s”

p. 351: University of Maryland’s Peace and Conflict Ledger 2003 . p. 352: only 32 countries out of 161 with serious conflicts—U.S. is only involved in a “handful”

p. 358: “American nationalism is unique for its focus on past achievements linked to future triumphs. Most nationalism around the world expresses itself in past tragedies linked to current grievances.”

p. 364: “The Bush Administration seems top-heavy in bold decision makers and short on visionaries. . .”

p. 365: “Most Americans are constantly confronted with pointlessly hyperbolic media debates about tactics, but are exposed to almost no calm deliberations regarding strategy.”

p. 373: State Department in desperate need of transformation

p. 378: if world stops buying U.S. debt, America is in trouble