Global Throughlines
Adapting to a North-South world
A Future Worth Creating
Despite growing up in a small, somewhat isolated farming community, I have always fancied myself as being in the world-saving business. Blame it on my strict Catholic upbringing, where I was taught that it’s all about emulating our Lord and Savior.
That mindset really picked up when I arrived at Madison WI to go to college at the UW, where I quickly decided that I would learn Russian and arms controls so I could stop WWIII (this being the scary early 1980s with Reagan). It further flourished when I moved onto Harvard for a master’s and PhD (both Soviet Union-focused), only to see that raison d’être disappear before my very eyes in 1989 as I finished my diss. After migrating to DC in 1990, I worked in a defense think tank and became fascinated with what was then just beginning to be called globalization.
Ah, globalization — the whole enchilada of the world-saving business. Despite no one asking for it, I began crafting this grand global narrative of globalization and America’s role in initiating, sponsoring, and defending its cluster of world-shaping (and saving) throughlines, the most compelling being the rise of a majority global middle class long thought to be impossible. Well before I left that think tank (Center for Naval Analyses) and headed off to the US Naval War College in Newport RI, I had become convinced that my professional future and globalization’s future would be one in the same.
A bit nutty, I know, but that’s how I think: save the world, save yourself — and vice versa. I have always wanted to live a life dominated by world headlines (Y2K, 9/11, GWOT, etc.). It’s just my way of connecting to history, the present, and the future. Without those throughlines, I personally feel lost, depressed, and isolated. With them, I have purpose, direction, and some baseline empathy with the universe and everyone with whom I share it (Jesus-like, in a Martin Scorsese kind of way). If that sounds like a religion very particularly defined, it’s because that is exactly what it is.
Founding my religion
My religion is America’s positive role in shaping human history — nothing more and nothing less. That is my good fight. That is how I pay it back and forward. When America is doing well along that vector, I feel good, and when we fall out of step with that momentum, I feel bad.
In my typically feverish way (stringing red yarn from thumbtack to thumbtack on my vast wall board of newspaper clippings …), I am always seeking the next handhold as I attempt to climb the rock face of history, hoping to God I don’t fall off into madness — seriously. But it is not a lonely climb, and I am always looking for other free solo types, being deeply interested in the paths they forge toward similar peaks of understanding. [NOTE: this is why I ready almost exclusively outside of my professional domain of political science.]
That desire to connect across the web led me to blog for a solid decade surrounding my first big book, The Pentagon’s New Map in 2004. Before I was done, I had generated about 15,000 posts yielding several hundred follow-on publications for various magazines and journals. I had also traveled the world giving presentations, so many that I don’t remember most of them.
My blog back then was my workspace, freely shared with the world. I thought I would never give it up, but I eventually did to facilitate other types of work where I needed a lower profile. For the next decade or so, I figured I had accomplished as much as I could accomplish with all my writings (to include two sequels to The Pentagon’s New Map) and so I thought I was out of the world-saving business, having given it my best shot.
I will admit that I grew deeply unhappy with that situation, especially as my six kids grew up and I realized that I — along with the rest of you — was not leaving them a good enough world for them and theirs. That profound sense of shame really gnawed at me, effectively constituting a midlife crisis that dovetailed with the Trump presidency and the pandemic …
Then Throughline Inc. rang …
Actually, it was a mid-pandemic LinkedIn message from a now-middle aged disciple who, having been attracted to my thinking two decades earlier as a young Department of Navy CIO, had subsequently started his own enterprise strategy and design firm (Throughline Inc.).
Scott Williams possesses a very similar save-the-world mindset, matching my cockeyed optimism. He wanted me to jump back into that world with a new book based on my brief of the last dozen years — one that argued that climate change, demographics, and the emergence of a majority global middle class were turning our “horizontal” (on a wall map), East-West world into a “vertical” North-South world. Our shared mantra thus became a horizontal world made vertical.
Scott wanted to help me bring to market a book I could never imagine writing — one with lots of illustrations (hand-drawn political cartoons, you might call them) and data visualizations and designed in a very byte-sized format of “throughlines and threads” (57 in all). [NOTE: this is why we went with the “hybrid” publisher BenBella, as no major publishing house could imagine dealing with all those visuals (almost 80 in all).]
With Scott pulling me into Throughline’s orbit, I suddenly found myself working with graphic designers and artists, putting together a book that looked nothing like what I had done before. It was a stunningly creative process that re-kindled my world-saving instincts, super-empowering me to scale new heights in my thinking — leapfrogging all manner of identified “inevitabilities” (climate change, demographic aging, emergent global majority middle class) and racing ahead to the “inconceivables” I knew we as a species and nation would be forced in years ahead to embrace.
Simply put, writing this book was electrifying for me. I swear to God I could feel a flame dancing just above my skull when I was typing. It really was that magical a feeling — something I never thought I would ever experience again in my life and, therefore, I feel so incredibly indebted to Scott and Throughline for that lengthy explosion of expressive creativity.
So what’s going on with this Substack?
Writing America’s New Map: Restoring Our Global Leadership in an Era of Climate Change and Demographic Collapse is just the beginning of my collaborative role within Throughline Inc. We are building an entire sub-consultancy within the firm around the book, to include my speeches, workshops, consulting engagements, a board game (“Latitudes”), a Massive Online Open Course (via U. Maryland), and some AI-generated global scenario projects.
Where does this all lead? The opportunities keep flying in over the transom right now, so, quite frankly, I have no idea. I just know I will once again need an outlet to share my thoughts — not so much to impress but simply to decompress (as in, I don’t sleep well otherwise). I sort of require my mind to boil the ocean of data points out there every day so I can process it all, make some sense of it, getting it out of my head, and then crash. Otherwise, I literally don’t sleep. Not ideal. Perhaps an occupational hazard. But it’s simply how I’m wired.
What am I looking for from you, the reader?
Simple: feedback, dialogue, referrals, etc. Every day I realize how much more I have to learn to stay even within eyeshot of the curve speeding ahead.
Anyway, LinkedIn was too problematic for me, as I tend to generate in large volumes. Everyone has been telling me that Substack is the answer, so here we are (I and my Throughline team).
I intend to write something longer and more analytical most every workday, while firing off shorter pieces as they come to me around the clock. The subscription, as we construct it, will center on the former, while we’ll keep the latter free, along with some sort of summing up newsletter over the weekend.
That’s the plan for now, but it may change. I will let others worry about that while I simply crank.
Welcome aboard!
Great intro and I think a perfect place for you for now. A lot of good thought leadership is in this space, and some of it even makes money (well deserved). Looking forward to following. Thanks