Appearance on Dan Skinner's Conversations show on Kansas Public Radio (KPR)
A 27-min audio shared
Find the audio link here: https://kansaspublicradio.org/podcast/conversations/2023-11-13/americas-new-map-restoring-our-global-leadership-in-an-era-of-climate-change-and-demographic-collapse
The show thumbnail:
On this edition of Conversations, Thomas P.M. Barnett talks with host Dan Skinner about “America’s New Map: Restoring Our Global Leadership in an Era of Climate Change and Demographic Collapse.” For over 25 years, Barnett has served as an advisor on global complexity. Today Barnett is the Principal Business Strategist for Throughline, one of the nation’s leading enterprise and design strategy firms. Among other things, the firm specializes in translating complex ideas into visual solutions that help government, major corporations, nonprofits, and the military adapt to and understand our shifting world.
For those who prefer a written record, here is the transcript we ChatGPT’d.
Thomas Barnett 00:02
And that's the big thing about climate change. It's not so much what, it's where it's happening, things are being shifted. So think about a wheat belt in North America crucial for the world's food supply. That wheat belt is moving 25 kilometres north each year.
Dan Skinner 00:20
That's Thomas P. M. Barnett, and I'm Dan Skinner. This is conversations. For over 25 years, Thomas P and Barnett has served as an advisor on global complexity. Today, Barnett, he is the principal business strategist for Throughline, one of the nation's leading enterprise and design strategy firms. Among other things, the firm specializes in translating complex ideas into visual solutions that helped government, major corporations, nonprofits, and the military adapt to and understand our shifting world. He joins us to talk about America's New Map, Restoring Our Global Leadership in an Era of Climate Change and Demographic Collapse. Thomas, welcome to the program.
Thomas Barnett 01:15
Thanks for having me on.
Dan Skinner 01:16
Well, in this book, you present seven throughlines and we won't have time to dig into each of them. So given the scope of this book, before we talk about some of the primary issues you raise, give us a brief overview, what are readers going to find here?
Thomas Barnett 01:33
Well, the grand narrative is that America after World War Two took the rule set that knitted together our ultimately 50 states into the world's most powerful economy, and projected that rule set of free trade and mutual interdependency across the world. At first, just to the West. That part of the global economy developed at an amazing rate. So much so that the Chinese eventually marketized under Deng XIAO PING, and then we started talking about a global economy —ultimately, globalization, hugely successful, creates, for the first time in history, a majority global middle class. So when I talk about America being great, it's that it took that the opportunity after the Second World War to build a better world order and succeeded beyond its dreams. But now we have a truly multipolar system, we also have climate change as a result, we also have demographic transitions as a result, and we're looking at Global South that now is the repository for the bulk of future global middle class consumption. So a lot of things that are pushing us toward a future that's going to be north south, in terms of integration, not so much east west. So think about climate change, damaging the lower latitudes, and then making it more tumultuous, but in many ways more livable, in the very northern latitudes. And we're talking about roughly two Australia's worth of livable land disappearing in the lower latitudes and kind of magically appearing in the northern latitudes. History says, when you have that kind of wealth transfer, people are going to move in response. And we're seeing that all across nature, and humans are part of nature. So we're looking at northward movements of individuals on a mass scale that it's hard to imagine from today's perspective, even as we find immigration today to be a huge problem.
Dan Skinner 03:33
And I want to talk to you more about that in just a moment. Obviously, you know, this is global, in this perspective, the things you're talking about. And you notice in the first throughline that Americans have a poor understanding of globalization. What is it that Americans don't get?
Thomas Barnett 03:52
Well, part of it is the fact that for the longest time, we were the demand center in the global economy. So the world revolved around our tastes and desires. And within the United States, of course, the Boomers were the key consumer generation that dominated the second half of the 20th century. And so when everything revolves around you, you have a hard time paying attention to the kind of tumultuous forces you unleash when you send this global package around the world, and start integrating traditional societies and start to get a certain amount of blowback from those traditional societies. Because globalization, when it comes in, tends to empower broadly, and that upsets hierarchical orders and upsets authorities — that upsets religions. And you get sort of a cultural blowback, like we saw on 9/11 and we see all the time around the world. So that's hard for us to understand, because the rules that we spread around the world basically were our rules. So why wouldn't anybody like them? Why wouldn't anybody want to be Westernized? Why wouldn't anybody want to become more like America? It's that sort of hubris, but also just that simple power, which is disappearing now. And that's part of our fear about globalization is that the future is not about us as it used to be. It's doesn't look like us, the future of the global economy is non white, non American, non European, non Western. And you know, when you don't see yourself in the future like that, the tendency is to start going into the past and indulging in nostalgia. And we're certainly in one of those phases in America. Make America great again, of course, is a call for us to return to the 1950s and 1960s, when we dominated that global economy.
Dan Skinner 05:42
And clearly, that's not going to work in today's world.
Thomas Barnett 05:46
Not gonna happen.
Dan Skinner 05:47
So let's come back to climate change, massive changes there, as you pointed out —a shift in population, which means the economic centers of the world are going to be shifting as well. How does America, as it forges this new map, adapt to that change?
Thomas Barnett 06:04
Well, scientists will tell you that any species in the world has three choices: adapt, move, or die. Okay? Most species cannot adapt fast enough, scientists will tell you, they're being forced … they're being asked to adapt evolutionary wise, and roughly 10,000 times the normal pace. Stuff that used to take hundreds of 1000s or even millions of years to unfold are happening in decades right now. So we're living through the sixth great mass extinction in our planet's history. A lot of species are going to get wiped out in this process. Okay, move. That means going up in latitude. That means going up in elevation. We're seeing this with species all over the world. So everybody's migrating toward the poles, as are, in effect, clouds because the subtropics zones are expanding, as they get more drought ridden. And they're pushing what used to be lower latitudes storm tracks up into upper latitude storm tracks. So for example, I grew up in Wisconsin, as a kid, I saw maybe a couple dozen rainbows in my childhood, I moved out east for 40 years, came back, I saw a couple dozen rainbows in the first month I was there. Now that's not weird. If you're living in Honolulu, it is weird in Madison, Wisconsin. And that's the big thing about climate change. It's not so much what as where it's happening, things are being shifted. So think about a wheat belt in North America crucial for the world's food supply. That wheat belt is moving 25 kilometers north each year. So all these things say to us, there is a north-south imperative that's coming. We can deal with that by trying to build walls and repel. And we're seeing some of this being done around the world. copycatting what we're doing on our southern border. And in some instances, you're seeing kind of, you know, massacres. The Saudi security forces recently murdered about 1000 Ethiopian climate refugees coming across the Yemen border. We saw the Italian coast guard let a ship of about 1000 climate migrants go down in the Med. We're getting to the point where we're starting to turn this into a violent dynamic. And the argument in the book is, hey, you know, we have to do something to keep a resilient population. in that part of the world. We also have to absorb those portions of that population in the lower latitudes that can't stay there resiliently. Better for us to extend membership in larger union southward, so as to socialize that risk than to batten down the hatches, build walls and shoot them at the border.
Dan Skinner 08:48
So for the United States, as this shifts over time, it goes further and further north. It goes beyond the borders of the United States. So how does America still retain its position as economic force? Does it mean they need to invest in things outside of the country, or what does that scenario look like?
Thomas Barnett 09:11
Well, it means we need to think about building kind of interstitial tissue between us and the South — however defined networks, foreign direct investment flows, membership and larger unions, whether it's a union a free movement, like the EU has with the Schengen zone, or a currency union, whatever we can do, to connect the smaller countries across Latin America, Caribbean and South America, to larger institutions, so that when this stuff starts to really hit them over the next several decades, they're not trying to go it alone. If they are caught trying to go it alone, we're gonna see state failure on a fairly large scale in these lower latitudes, meaning, we're gonna see a lot of people put on the move out of desperation. So think about reopening the United States for new membership. Think about new ways of connecting with the outside world. People will say, well, that's, that's pretty dramatic. I mean, how are we supposed to make these kinds of things happen with non contiguous states? Well, we already did it with Alaska and Hawaii. And we're looking at the EU's model, the last 30-40 years where they're integrating Eastern Europe, sovereign nations into a larger union. And on that basis, pooling sovereignty, and creating a larger demand pool, which I think is crucial for us, because if India with over a billion people, and China, with over a billion people are going to dominate demand in the 21st century, one of the best ways for us to remain a key player in the global economy is to bulk up ourselves. There are billion Americans living in the western hemisphere. And I would like to see that unified on some bases, however, achieved, you know, I have the punch line in the book about putting more stars on the US flag. But there are many things we can do short of that. And alongside that, to really kind of integrate a part of the world that's not integrated with us now, and will be integrated into Chinese or European networks in the next two or three decades, if we don't make that effort ourselves.
Dan Skinner 11:20
Another challenge that you discuss at length in the book is the changing demographics. The world is getting older in terms of population. So tell us a little bit about the impact that that has not only the United States, but worldwide
Thomas Barnett 11:35
When you join globalization, you tend to do so on the basis of a demographic dividend. That what we call the baby boomers, an abnormally large generation that dominates your worker pool for two or three decades. And if you're smart and connect your economy up to the global economy during that period, then you're in global value chains. The cost, or the Faustian bargain here is when you do that and take advantage of a demographic dividend — that abnormally large demographic cohort or generation then usually sets in motion aging, a fairly rapid aging of your population. So think about America, we had our baby boom, after the Second World War. Now we got all those Boomers heading towards retirement. Other countries like China, really drastically reduced their fertility, created that artificially large demographic dividend that China, for example, enjoyed across the 1990s and 2000s. Now we're seeing China depopulate, and begin to age very rapidly. So there's the cost of joining globalization, and then there's the imperative to keep globalization moving, so it can integrate the next great waves of youth bulges. We're looking at one right now about a half billion souls in India. And beyond that, we're looking at another one in Africa and the Middle East of about a billion souls. So there's imperative there for north south integration, not just because we want to keep globalization expanding, and creating new wealth and production centers but because we have to deal with the fact that the North is demographically aging at a very fast pace, and needs to bring in immigrants to prevent them from turning into like a giant nursing home, which is what, frankly, Japan's turning into.
Dan Skinner 13:24
So in regard to this challenge that is facing the world. How does America's map change moving forward?
Thomas Barnett 13:33
Well, the United States has its own particular situation going on. I mean, we are experiencing demographic collapse among the major racial group of American Whites. And I would argue that collapse — that decline, going from about 90% of America's population back in 1950, dropping to less than half of that by 2050. That journey is unprecedented for any country around the world. And it's creating enormous political tensions. I would argue, the political polarization that we experience now, is profoundly derived from that dynamic. For example, the Republicans continue to be about 80-85%. White, while the Democrats have shifted to something much closer to what we're actually experiencing now, about a 60-40 split between White and non White. There's also a generational aspect to this. You know, the mean age for Whites in America is in the late 50s. The mean age for non Whites in America is the late 20s. Okay, so we're seeing this kind of generational conflict between Boomers, who grew up in the Cold War view, the world and East West terms are constantly declaring Cold Wars right and left every other day. And then we have this younger, much more blended much more racially diverse, younger generations who are very interested in talking about climate change. Okay, so when you think about the future, and the reality that we're going to face in terms of immigration pressures, that overwhelmingly White generation of the Boomers, which has turned out to be fairly anti-immigrant, that's going to be off the stage by mid century. And we're going to look at an American electorate, that on the basis of projections is going to be one out of three voters are Latino. So at that point, the possibility of opening America up for larger membership for tracks like what the Europeans have done with Eastern Europe over the last two, three decades and are still doing — they have 10 new states applying for membership in the EU right now, the imperative is going to be to open ourselves up to larger collections on that basis, kind of dissuade the Chinese from taking over Latin America, which is what they're kind of doing right now with the whole Belt and Road Initiative and the other things, they're bringing 5g networks. We either step up and kind of defend our civilization here in the West, which I think is real and worth saving and interesting all by itself. We don't tend to think of ourselves as a civilization in the Western Hemisphere. Because if we don't, we're gonna find ourselves crowded out by a lot of other forces that come in and integrate Latin America. And we're not going to be happy with that down the road. Because as Latin America experiences this climate change and everything else, they're going to continue to send immigrants our way in very, very large numbers. And it would be better for us to integrate southward to kind of modulate that flow, to keep as much of the local population resiliently in place. Because if the Chinese come in, and they're interested primarily in extracting resources and food, then we're going to get stuck with the aftermath, or the collateral damage of that process as climate change hits.
Dan Skinner 16:53
And I want to take a moment to discuss the other big challenge that you address in the book. And that is an expanding global middle class. Tell us more about that?
Thomas Barnett 17:04
Well, in any society, you want a big, thick, middle: you don't want too many poor, you don't want too many rich, the so called special interests, on either side. You know, the poor want protection from their circumstances, the rich quite cynically want protection from the poor. What the middle class wants is the hardest to deliver. It wants protection from the future. It has a decent life. It wants to protect that life. It wants to pass it on to its children. You scare the middle class, for example, in America, and you get a very intolerant country and we're in one of those periods. Okay, so we ran the experiment of an expanding middle class appearing in the West Europe and the United States at the turn of the 20th century. We got attempts from the left (socialism, communism, Bolshevism). We got attempts from the right Fascism, Nazism to try to control that emergent middle. In America, we threaded the needle. Thanks to the two Roosevelts,s I would say Theodore and Franklin, and we made our system middle class based. Now we're looking at rerunning that experiment on a global scale, Near 2000, global middle class was about 2 billion. It's up to 4 billion now. It'll be more like six to 7 billion mid century. I'm arguing if we succeed in modeling the right kind of behavior and engaging in the right kind of integration, we will have a very demonstrative effect on those countries experiencing an expansion of their middle class, encouraging them to let the middle class rule itself. The alternative, which the Chinese are promoting all over the world, are social control technologies added on to their Belt and Road Initiative that allow governments to basically control and surveil on a very mass scale, their own middle class that develops and ultimately, I would argue, a lot of illiberal regimes push to control that middle class so it doesn't have aspirations to rule itself. There's also just the sheer volume of consumption that's happening in the global middle class, largely located in the south. We're talking about all sorts of people who have never had kind of branded products in their universe, and are starting to experience the opportunity to attach themselves to global brands. We know from history that, you know, when you're young and you enter a market, you buy your first car, you vote for your first president, those early choices tend to determine your brand loyalties for the rest of your life to an unusual degree. So think about America needing to have access to that global middle class to influence their brand selections. Otherwise, we're getting shut out of the largest engine of economic growth in the system over the course of this century. So there are economic reasons There are ideological reasons. And there are reasons that just speak to the health of our own democracy, for America to be in the business of trying to win the hearts and minds of this global middle class and show them the path forward towards self rule.
Dan Skinner 20:15
Thomas, you've laid out some major changes that we're facing worldwide. How optimistic are you that America will successfully make the changes needed to respond to those challenges that you outlined?
Thomas Barnett 20:29
My optimism is generationally defined? I don't expect to change the minds of any Boomers or their mini-me generation, the Gen Xs. They are so wedded to this Cold War model and mindset of looking at the world. I am very enthused by the response to the book and the ideas among Millennials and Gen Zs who are very interested in climate change, who have lost their sense of patriotism and identity with America, because there are so many identities out there to be had in this modern world, especially as the metaverse comes online. So I don't worry about what can be accomplished in the next 10 to 15 years. I think we're stuck with these culture wars as long as the Boomers rule. They love re litigating the past. I think when the Millennials and Gen Zs come on board with the cultural diversity that they have, we're going to see some movement towards this opportunity of north-south integration — the obligation, really, for north-south integration to avoid very negative dynamics of masses of humanity heading northward. And us, you know, we're already seeing presidential candidates brag openly about how much violence they're willing to employ to secure our southern border, I don't want to see that kind of outcome happen. I know, from the basis of my own six kids (two Millennials, four Gen Zs), that's not an America, they're going to sign up for. That's not a military, they're going to join. That's not an America they want to build. So I'm optimistic, longer term. And I'm really writing this book and spreading this message for younger generations, because I know the older ones are locked in. But they're in the process of leaving the political theater. And the sooner we get that, I would argue, the better.
Dan Skinner 22:18
So we’ve just touched on many of the issues you raised in this book. And we've talked about some of these in part, but what would you say are the key insights that you hope readers are going to take from this book?
Thomas Barnett 22:30
Well, the optimism of this book is to say, hey, if we have a future that's going to force north-south integration, if this is the biggest structural change the world has experienced in human history, the Western Hemisphere is extremely advantaged for this future relative to Asia, relative to the European/African/Middle East center slice. If you think of the world in three slices, Western Hemisphere, Europe and Africa, and then you got Asia, we are built for this future. You know, think about the racial mixing that's gone on inside the western hemisphere for the last half a millennia, thanks to the European colonialization. You had Amerindians here, a lot of them wiped out when the Europeans first came as settlers. The Europeans came in numbers, brought enslaved Africans in numbers, encouraged the emigration of cheap labor from Asia in numbers. So the big three racial groups of the eastern hemisphere, Caucasians, Africans and Asians, they've been coming and mixing here with each other and the local population for the last half of millennia, which gives us a degree of diversity, which is absolutely amazing relative to the rest of the world. Okay, so I would argue almost like humans in the story of HG Wells’ War of the Worlds, you know, we've earned the right to be good at this sort of integration, because we've been forced to do so by outside forces for centuries. And that makes us better prepared than other parts of the world that have greater religious and linguistic diversity. For example, the Western Hemisphere, we have four languages that basically cover everybody. We also are stunningly uniform on a religious basis. It's not Muslim versus Christian in the Western Hemisphere. It's overwhelmingly Christian: 80% of the population, 60% of the Western Hemisphere Catholic. So when you think about the integration that we're looking at, the path ahead for us is much easier than the other parts of the world. And we tend to be abnormally blessed in terms of water, and food, and energy, and minerals. So our future's bright, we need to think about that north-south integration because the Chinese are moving in dramatically across Latin America, and they have a tendency to vacuum up resources and to flood the situation with cheap consumer goods. And then they had the tendency also to spread their security and social surveillance technologies to these countries. And I think we're looking at a future that we're not going to be happy with, unless we start to claim some ownership and some co- ownership of this Western Hemisphere with our neighbors, which requires us to radically rethink how we interact with Latin America. You know, what we have right now is anti-immigrant fervor. We have xenophobia. We have a lot of fear directed towards Latin America, and we have the Drug War. And none of those things are really working for us. And none of them speak to the future that we need to adapt ourselves to. Because climate change is baked in, it's coming. The next four or five decades are going to get dramatically worse before it probably levels off. And either we adapt ourselves much like species are required to adapt themselves, or we're going to die. As an institution, we're going to be hollowed out as a democracy, and ended up being some sort of autocracy, some sort of White Christian nationalist state that's determined to keep out those it finds to be too alien for its ranks.
Dan Skinner 26:14
Well, to learn more, the book is America's New Map: Restoring Our Global Leadership in an Era of Climate Change and Demographic Collapse. It's by Thomas P. M. Barnett. Thomas, thank you very much for talking with me today.
Thomas Barnett 26:31
Thanks for having me on.
Dan Skinner 26:33
I talk with a wide variety of authors of both fiction and nonfiction. And if you'd like to hear some of these other conversations, interviews, you'll find them at Kansas public radio.org/conversations. You can use the KPR app to hear the latest episodes on your phone or tablet. And you'll also find us on Facebook. I'm Dan scanner. Thanks for listening.