The ranks (ret.) have questions
Responding to a military book club discussing "America's New Map"
The requesting email:
Dear Sir,
I work with the American College of National Security Leaders (https://acnsl.net/), and a few months ago our President, MG (retired) Peter Cooke, suggested we start a book club for those fellows and interns who wished to take part.
We first reviewed Peter Zeihan’s “The End of the World is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization.” We then reviewed “Four Battlegrounds: Power in the Age of Artificial Intelligence” by Paul Scharre. Because I have been reading you for some time (certainly since 2004), I suggested your new book as our next subject and Cooke readily agreed.
We discussed your book last Thursday, and during the discussion it became apparent that several of them had either read your Politico article or listened to one of your recent appearances. And - something that is typical with this group of retired flag officers - several attendees raised questions.
I considered just going back to your previous writings in response but realized that events are moving quickly, and your viewpoints are probably evolving at the same rate. Thus, I am writing this directly so you can provide us with your most up-to-date thinking …
[questions posed here but revealed below]
I really appreciate any feedback you can give us. Those who participated in the discussion really enjoyed your book and obviously some have taken additional interest in your other presentations and writings.
I’ll also ask the Chief of Staff to provide all the college members with the web sites to your recent appearances, the Politico article and keep sending them relevant information from Substack.
Sincerely,
Mike Roulier
CW4, USA (retired)
The questions, embedded in the above email (reprinted here with permission), were as follows, with my replies to each:
The first question had to do with your article and appearances, and your comments on both Greenland and Canada. Were you simply trying to be provocative? And given Trump’s history of making bombastic statements and then walking away, is he being provocative or does he intend to follow through? Finally, if he does follow through, do you have a feel for the timing?
ANM doesn’t mention Greenland, but it does broach the logic of a US-Canada merger as proposed by Canadian journalist/pundit Diane Francis in her Merger of the Century book from the pre-Trumpian year of 2013.
What I especially liked about Francis’ argument was:
Analogizing it to the corporate world: as in, if Canada and the US were two corporations, this merger would’ve happened long ago for obvious business-logic reasons (complementarity in both needs and assets, adjacent and highly similar consumer markets). That is a solid argument on its own grounds, so it should taken seriously.
Analogizing it to the EU (something The Economist just did!), using the same basic pitch of complementarity without over-emphasizing the minor inter-state rivalry (even that seems like too strong of a word) of US-v-Canada nationalism relative to, say, Germany and France overcoming their historical animosities to birth the EU-forerunner (European Coal and Steel Community) — a reminder of (a) these things take time and circumstances to unfold over the years and (b) the right collective fear is a great motivator (back then: united we Europeans stand up to the Soviet threat or divided we fall!).
Me realizing that Francis’ combined-assets observation (i.e., put the two together and you’ve got the biggest resource holder and the strongest military), when contextualized within a future world shaped decisively by climate change (an ANM core logic), accurately describes THE perfect superpower combination for this century — sort of like a Steph Curry and and a Lebron James deciding to pair up in their primes on a single team (answering the question of which matters more: your “independence” or your winning in a dramatically evolving league?).
When I finished Francis’ book, the epiphany hit me: If I could morph into some super-empowered Henry Kissinger of the 21st century, the deal I would most seek to make is a Canada-US merger because that outcome beats or at least ensures against ANY potential competitor or even group of competitors out there this century.
Once you bump into that — to me — very powerful logic, then you’re completely open to asking any and all questions regarding how to get there. And no, my mind does not immediately race to military invasion or economic coercion. The only way this works is if the deal is so sweet (partially in response to a perceived collective threat/competition) that both sides WANT it.
This is a signature of my strategic approach: find an essential truth like this and then be entirely on the lookout for opportunities to seed/progress /actualize its achievement — i.e., serious visionary stuff that ain’t about next Tuesday but typically the next generation.
Trump’s recent musings on the subject are just such an opportunity. Are they my preferred discussion starter? No, but if you want to think in grand strategic terms, you can’t wait on perfect instigators. You run with the currents as they reveal themselves, always looking for the fastest one to propel your “canoe” down that inevitable “river” — even in those instances where it feels like you’re counter-intuitively hoping for your team to “lose” short-term so as to benefit long term (how I rationalize Trump’s worst behaviors, admittedly).
That odd situation happens more than I care to admit.
Example: FDR “loses” Yalta to Stalin, in part because of his great confidence that, in a head-to-head competition going forward, the USSR would be no match for the US. He was right — on a 44-year timeframe (1945-1989). That’s the level you want to operate at — seriously.
Example: 9/11 was a serious loss that took us down a path profoundly different from the one we were on just prior (namely, early military showdown with China). To me, and I know this sounds cruel, that was a blessing in disguise (and I put that in print!) because it prioritized attention to the Persian Gulf (a disaster long in the building from 1970s onward) while postponing the widely-hoped-for clash of the titans somewhere in East Asia.
The outcome? Not at all welcome for most Americans: because of our unwillingness to adapt the force to the small-wars paradigm, we ended up with “forever wars” that occupied and then drained our profound post-9/11 anger long enough for China to largely complete its rise and reach a level of military maturity where US dreams of a preemptive showdown dissipated into the realization that we’re now looking at a military peer for all practical purposes — certainly at least in East Asia.
[As for Bush’s Big Bang theory of forever disrupting the calcified Middle East for the long-term better (either by successfully transforming Iraq and freaking out the entire region in the process or … doing the exact opposite and achieving the same result — a brutally cynical theory), I believe history will be surprising kind to W because the region is progressing nicely in many ways today and I think our takedown of Saddam will be viewed as an “inadvertent” but key contributor to that positive outcome (and yes, I realize what a minority report that perspective remains to this day).]
Understand, getting the US and China to that safer (IMHO) moment in history was worthwhile — even if the dynamic that achieved it was 9/11+GWOT (not that anybody wishes for it but merely contextualizes it once it happens — lemons —> lemonade), because it gave both sides the time to mature their sense of economic interdependency that defines global stability this century — and yeah, THAT greater good in the form of an emergent global majority middle class outweighs that cost by a great margin.
Does that mean I callously discount the human cost — military and civilian? Not at all. In fact, I honor it all the more as a result, as most wars are not understood strategically in their time. [I would also offer than I spent years advocating for ‘transformations’ within DoD to lower that cost, so no, I was neither oblivious.]
Point being, there is no logic in a grand strategy that presumes or demands that we win all the time on every point. Grand strategies have to balance market-making and market-playing because it’s not just your success that you’re seeking but the success of the world order within which that success is secured — and that (duh!) requires compromise.
You can’t always get what you want, but, if you try sometimes, you get what you need.
Would I have selfishly preferred a weak China and never-ending US supremacy instead? Not really. First, we eventually would have screwed that up in our hubris (when you’re on top, the only direction is down). Second, that would have involved too much of the world remaining poor and hopeless and angry and violent and I don’t want that pathway for the US because I think we do much better on this pathway — again, accepting the strategic pain required to get the two of us there.
I now feel very similar about the China-India dynamic: I am willing to entertain all sorts of hard-for-China developments if those developments prevent any stupid war or conflict between the two by occupying Beijing just long enough to obviate those alternative pathways. [And, yeah, a splendidly stupid little war between the US and PRC over Taiwan could accomplish that to India’s benefit, but so could a region-wide balancing arms race already underway — without any bloodshed.]
Why explain all that?
To explain how I can simultaneously aspire to be a super-pro-American grand strategist and yet balance that selfish desire with a truly global perspective on the better-of-world-paths-to-achieve as part of that grand strategic vision.
Again: we need to balance the old market-making instinct of the Cold War era with the natural market-playing instinct Trump now champions. It’s not an either-or choice, so, yeah, sometimes you will argue for developments that seem inconceivable to one side of the competing pro-US-v-pro-world-stability personas that I think any serious grand strategist must dually embrace, because, even when you’re in the throes of one perspective, you’re always working to reach out and accommodate and enlist the purpose of the other side of that equation.
This is how Barnett the “obvious” globalist can write a piece in Politico that suddenly seems to cast him an unadulterated US expansionist (these swings in perception of who I am always strike me as a Bob-Dylan-goes-electric-at-Newport bafflement). Trump-the-current-opportunity-to-change-strategic-perspectives is real and powerful and should not be dismissed out of reflexive opposition (a tendency I myself fight every day).
I do not believe we should annex or invade or strong-arm anybody into a bad deal. Irredentism (the quest to regain long-long “sacred” lands like the Ukraine or Taiwan or the Panama Canal) is a losing dynamic because of all the externalities it unleashes (out-of-control chauvinism and fascistic tendencies to be chief among them).
But if Trump raises these issues and everyone feels like they’re coming out of the blue … well, then that’s my opportunity to educate and contextualize and broad frame an inevitability that nonetheless strikes many today as simply inconceivable.
Do I see Panama successfully — and thus plausibly — on its own in 2050 and not part of something bigger, organized by one of the superpowers of this century (US, EU, Russia, India, China)?
No, I do not.
Same holds for Greenland, where I find the notion of Denmark being “enough” for its strategic needs this century to be … implaus (no offense to the Danes, please!).
As for Canada, I think it is entirely logical for Canadians to recognize they will need to pair up with somebody in coming years/decades to handle all the transformational aspects introduced by climate change, to include mass migration pressures that call into question Canada’s “right” to claim all that territory as their own when they are so few in natural/climatic wealth and the displaced millions—>billions are so many many in natural/climatic poverty [And yes, you are picking up a Camp of the Saints vibe here, which is why that book is so effective in its uber-right propaganda.]
I simply do not see a Canada willing to do what it takes to hoard that wealth and space because that is a perverted Canada that either succumbs to the wrong partnership (bullied into one by Russia/China?) or evolves into some unrecognizable authoritarian state so as to preserve its (questionably greedy) sovereignty (Eh! We stole this last!).
[And yeah, I see how the same logic can be applied to the US and most certainly the Russian Federation, as we collectively face some big existential challenges ahead in a climate-reformatted world system, where needs will overwhelm resources if we stick to current sovereignty paradigms, which we presently hold in too much regard as a legacy of our post-WWII fears. Simply put, we no longer live in that world or that century, particularly as globalization digitalizes.]
Understand, I come from the Gaia Vince school of thought on there being two types of people in this world later this century: those put on the move by climate change and those forced to deal with those put on the move by climate change. A boatload of things are going to be redefined in our world order, in our national economic and political systems, in our communities and faiths, and in just about damn near everything else — a scary nightmare to some but a huge opportunity to me.
So, again, being so armed with that long-term contextualized understanding AND remaining an almost indefensibly American-centric thinker, I will jump at the chance to broach these strategic realities whenever events (or just Trump) allow.
So, Trump’s “follow through” interests me less than a growing public awareness/tolerance/acceptance of these larger strategic realities, such as Canada 2050-2060 having to become part of some integration scheme northward (Russia), westward (China), eastward (EU), or southward (US). Long-term inevitabilities are — again — not solved or figured out by the next election. And, as for public stomaching, that’s typically a generational turnover phenomenon, so, no, I don’t cite current polls as proving anything, because EVERYBODY wants to balance the big powers off against one another. It just rarely actually works.
As for timing, to me, it’s like the Green Bay Packers’ fabulous playoff run in 2011, when they started out as the 6th seed (beating Philly away, then Atlanta away, then Chicago away, with me and the missus attending the last two) and then having the gall to defeat Pittsburgh in the Super Bowl: somewhat inconceivable but set in motion by an other-worldly performance streak by a now-widely-recognized-as-nutto Aaron Rodgers.
Did we have any business winning that year? Sure as hell did. Should we “realistic” fans have held out for a later “better” year — you know, the one that NEVER arrived under Rodgers? No, that would have been stupid, because, when the circumstances are right, and you have the right person to make it happen, and it actually unfolds, then inconceivable suddenly elevates to inevitable — in the backward glance of history.
So, do I think Trump is just having fun? I have no idea but he seems like he is.
Could he pull off some Nixon-goes-to-China thing? On Canada, we’re nowhere near that self-awareness yet in either the US or up-attic. As for Greenland? Fifty-seven-thousand counterparties can be bought off rather cheaply, and, who knows, maybe Trump can make that deal happen.
But here’s the thing with grand strategy: the long perspective must rule, as must a happy-ending-promise, because if your grand strategy is just about surviving the apocalypse, then that’s not grand strategy but bullshit doom-peddling designed to up your speaking fees and book sales and I refuse to drink from that cup.
The second question had to do with Ukraine, and – by extension – Taiwan. You have stated in the past that Trump will make a deal on Ukraine (and finally get his Nobel Peace Prize!), and that you believe that Ukraine will certainly wind up in Putin’s orbit. Do you have a feel for what a deal will look like, and whether Putin will possibly get enough territory to threaten Poland and Romania? And, again, the timing. Finally, do you see peril for Taiwan (and the resultant effect on our semiconductor availability).
I hate to answer such questions by claiming these are all “details,” but, in grand strategic terms, these are all details.
For old portions of the Russian empire to escape (very different from Poland or Romania), the collapse of the current Russian Federation is basically required. I will admit I am ambivalent on this score, as I am not sure the world needs a unified Russia for global stability and I suspect Russian identity and nationalism simply aren’t up to the task this century.
So, if I want a truly detached Ukraine, Georgia, and the like, I’d need to be ready to go there and I just don’t see America or the EU or even China and India welcoming that anytime soon.
Having said that, can I foresee a collapsed and divided/divorced Russia by 2050? Sure can. I can see one dominated in the west by Europe, captured in the Central Asian “center” more by risen India, and pretty much purchased outright by China in the Far East.
With that long-term perspective, I have zero desire to roll the dice on nuclear warfare with Russia over Ukraine or anybody else. Don’t really have any great fear of it, but don’t want to toy with it either — just no point.
The big wild card here is not Trump, who can leverage Putin some but I suspect not much. Instead, it all comes down to how long Putin lives. Once he goes, things will fall apart — per his apres moi, le deluge construct of rule. We should be ready for that, even as its unfolding will involve us far less than the other three superpowers out there (EU, India, China). But, again, I’m not risking an actual strategic nuclear exchange over Ukraine — just doesn’t compute.
I have similar strategic judgments about Taiwan and have stated them for years. As for some semiconductor apocalypse, I’m not buying. I think DeepSeek just reminded us that China is going to be China in high tech all on its own. Taiwan isn’t, on its own, tipping that global race/imagined “supremacy.” So, again, no, I’m unwilling to blow up the world system over who rules Taiwan. It just doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things.
Having said that, I’m all in for up-arming Taiwan and the region vis-a-vis China, because that is a self-licking-ice-cream-cone as far as I can see (requiring no assembly and highly profitable).
The third question had to do with Peter Zeihan’s book, and how your viewpoints differ from his, if at all.
I think I answered that above, but here’s what I will say: I don’t read the competition, so to speak, for the same reason why I typically skip Foreign Affairs. If I wanted to think like everybody else, then I’d read everybody else. I prefer to read everything and anything outside of my “field” (whatever that is).
I got caught doing that in Great Powers (2009) after years of being accused on not citing the “heavyweights” enough in my work (Pentagon’s New Map 2004 and Blueprint for Action 2005). When I did do “enough” of that in Great Powers, I was then dismissed as being too derivative (Oh my, said the NYT, that Barnett sure has read his Friedman and Zakaria!).
My attitude since then has been to fuck all that nonsense, spend almost all my time reading outside my perceived-by-others “lane,” and coming to my own, oftentimes unique perspectives.
Grand strategy is serious vision, and visionaries don’t play well with others. Instead, the herald the future in the style of John the Baptist (bit nutty, by most standards, and yet a compelling story). [This is why I work best with Founders, who typically have a messiah complex to begin with!]
Zeihan has his own shtick and I have mine. His is scare-the-crap out of you with everything collapsing. I find that approach lacking (polite term) and refuse to be associated with those sales tactics. I have no personal dislike for anybody who does that. It’s just not my thing — by choice and temperament and philosophy and being able to sleep at night (okay, that does sound like some disrespect there …).
Let me put it in the manner of a story I like to tell:
Back in 2001 I got two season tix to the upper bowl just constructed at Lambeau. I was in heaven, but, after formative years in which the Packers tended to suck (1970s, 1980s), I had become an inveterate Cassandra bemoaning just about everything all the time as indicating YET ANOTHER DEMORALIZING PACKERS LOSS! I was, in effect, the ultimate Debbie Downer.
When I started going to games, if and when anything went south, I would freak out and making comments to my section, which, in its strange familiarity, is an intimate situation in this weird, family-like way that has developed over these two dozen years since, in a Same Time, Next Year kind of thing with births, deaths, getting older, new spouses, getting moved to the handicap sections …
But I digress …
One game it finally hit me: we were losing bad and I was totally losing it, as was this guy a few seats over in the next section. Then, a miracle and we mount this fabulous comeback. I look over and see the Great Complainer processing this moment and he can’t: he’s too committed to his doom-and-gloom persona so he just sits there, disgruntled by being proving wrong by his beloved team!
As I watched this guy continue to stew, it struck me: why the hell am I paying all this money and traveling across half the country (we lived in RI then) to come to these games JUST TO FEEL MISERABLE ALL THE TIME AND SPREAD THAT MISERY TO OTHERS?
Why not be the positive guy who … wait for it … always holds out hope and speaks toward a happy ending?
I later had this epiphany confirmed when attending the 2007 AFC Championship game in the old RCA stadium in Indianapolis (we lived there then) between Manning’s Colts and Brady’s Patriots. My spouse and I sat in the third row, Colts side, 40 yard-line with a bunch of season ticket holders. Guy next to me, during halftime and with the Colts down 21-6, stands in line to buy a Colts-win-the-AFC commemorative t-shirt, which he proudly shows me as the second-half kickoff is occurring. He was ecstatic: I got the last one!
I just looked at him and said, this guy knows how to fan up!
The Colts won, 38-34, in an Ali-Frazier-like slugfest I will never forget.
If you want to be a grand strategist, in my mind then, you need to embrace your inner happy warrior, or someone who believes in happy endings or ultimate wins — strange bedfellows and all.
And yes, you have to pick a team and stick with it — even as you care deeply about the world order.
Anything short of that effort/outlook and you’re just another whining Chicken Little, and life is too precious to be stuck in that soul-sucking rut.
Ian Bremmer, a colleague over the years, once told me that authenticity is the key. Ian is a very balanced, middle-of-the-road guy and he advises along those sensible lines. I come from the Gene Roddenberry school of futurism, so I sell optimism and grand ambition. Zeihan, as talented as he is, does the dark-side-of-the-Force stuff and a lot of people crave that.
But that ain’t me.
Mike and Co: thanks for the questions and being okay with me answering in this fashion.
Honestly, I get such requests all the time and I HATE THEM!
Why?
They always seem like uncompensated writing assignments that I want to honor and yet resent. So, the worst outcome is I blow you off with some quick dashed-out email so I can get my “far more important” Substack done.
Whereas the best outcome is to not blow you off and make you my next Substack!
Hoping this works for you as well as it has for me.
In repayment, consider going out and finding a corporate sponsor to pay my travel and a decent honorarium and then invite me to address your group or some group or some conference this year. Or just get the honorarium and I do it remote.
Thanks to Mike and Peter and the rest for your service to this country we love, and still feeling that instinct in retirement.
