Thomas P.M. Barnett -- The Short Form

It all comes down to three dynamics spread across three levels

So I get an email from the PR agency presently supporting me about some Semafor journalist who wants to talk. Guy seemed completely unaware of me or my writings (not odd), but wanted to talk to get my lay of the geo-strategic landscape (sure, why not?).

I was raised to be polite about such things, so I make the call on What’s App to this London-based journo and he basically asks me to give him my extended “elevator speech":

---

An elevator speech is a brief introduction that summarizes a product, service, or person. It's called an elevator speech because it should be short enough to deliver during an elevator ride.

---

We had scheduled 15 mins for the call, so … an extended elevator speech but one nonetheless whittled down to its core concepts: This is Barnett’s take on the world!

If I didn’t do this for a living, that would have seemed like a very intimidating request. But I do, and so I did, in a rapid-fire stream-of-consciousness way that I wished I had taped so my lazy ass didn’t need to try and replicate it here.

Thus I offered the following, keeping my usual approach of starting at the system level, coming down to the nation-state level, and then concluding with the subnational or individual level.

So, yeah, I still organize things per Kenneth Waltz’s “three images.”

A book that changed my life

For example, here’s how Waltz’s three images concerning the causes of conflict are typically parsed across the three main schools of thought in international relations.

And here’s how I once used Waltz’s three images to parse a post-9/11 world.

So, I pretty much always reach for the Big Picture (system, which I place on top — duh!), counterpose that to the Small Picture (subnational/individual), and then speak to how those two bump into one another in the Medium Picture (state-on-state action).

If we’re talking democracies, then the subnational level really matters, as governments are responsive — reflective even. If authoritarian, then the subnational matters only to the degree that the population can threaten the authorities, otherwise it’s mostly meaningless and all that matters is what’s inside the leader’s head (e.g., Putin, Xi, and — right now — Trump).

So, here’s how I started out with this guy … at the system level …

[deep breath]

For the longest time, we’ve lived in an East-West world where the most important dynamics unfold along that vector — like major wars among great powers. North-South … not that important. No real Southern superpowers, so the Big Wars were all longitudinal while the Small Wars tended to characterize the North-on-South action (imperialism).

The big change today is the system-wide shift from predominant East-West dynamics to North-South dynamics.

Has the current generation of leadership around the world awakened sufficiently to that emerging reality?

Hardly. It’s not the world they grew up in and they stopped growing a long time ago.

For most strategic thinkers in the West, it’s all about us-v-them in various guises (China, Russia, or those two, or those two plus Iran and NorKo). So, still very East-West in terms of who’s up and who’s down but comfortingly simple in its binary breakdown.

As for the Global South, most thinkers view that zone as entirely “down,” as in, a waste of time to think about strategically beyond various raw materials and the backward idiots who stand in the way of our accessing them sufficiently.

So, when you talk about climate change with leaders today, it’s mostly blown off across the North (We have bigger fish to fry!) and a subject of great dread across my lower latitudes (my concept of Middle Earth stretching 30 degrees north and south of the equator). Down there, those leaders see great need and great threat, while up North, the advanced powers see only cost and threat — the latter largely in the form of poor people treading north for the “good life” most Northerners would rather not share and fear will be lost if swamped by all those others (The Camp of the Saints vibe).

Dirty poor people coming our way and we can’t kill them all!

So no, we are clearly leaning into this North-South world, due to latitudinal disparities already extant in climate change (tougher on South), demographics (tougher on North), and an emergent global majority middle class (more South than North), but our leadership is still stuck viewing the world almost exclusively in East-West terms (Cold War! WWIII! Containment!).

Nonetheless, that’s my core message: we are shifting from an East-West world to a North-South world, and that reality alone reshapes everything. Some species can sense that change roaring towards them; others are clueless.

Dropping to the state level, that system-level dynamic gets parsed in a number of ways. Economically, we speak of East-West decoupling and reshoring, both of which ironically favor North-South regionalism.

But, by and large, we in the North don’t want to speak of that openly, because then we’d be compelled to recognize the force (northward migrations) driving the current friction (anti-immigrant fervor due to its increasingly uncontrollable dynamics), and, to accept that would compel our acceptance of that North-South future, as we’d have to admit what climate change is doing (depopulating Middle Earth), we’d have to admit the demographic logic (young South replenishing an aging, birth-dearthed North), and we’d have to admit the emerging brand competition among superpowers to capture and win the loyalties of that South-centric, youth-centric future engine of global consumption (otherwise known as profit).

Trump, with his admittedly finely-tuned antenna, diagnoses that gap between what much of the public senses about our world (It no longer looks like us and will look even less so as time progresses) and what they’re presently comfortable considering in response (Enough with the DEI bullshit!).

Which brings us down to the subnational/individual level, where, right now, America’s inner turmoil over its ongoing racial makeover is basically driving us batty, so much so that those most threatened by this looming reality (i.e., those who love their White privilege, Christian privilege, and “true” American status as native-born) begin acting more and more the targeted victim (White genocide! The war on religion! Our immigrant replacements!) — thus justifying their “righteous” anger and cruelty.

Add up all that fear, and you bump into all manner of magical thinking: If we deconstruct the administrative state, all these looming realities will be dispelled like so much smoke and mirrors!

This is the Great Purge we now witness: the symbolic destruction of agencies and, through that dismantlement, the pursued dream of all these uncomfortable realties being dispersed (Get back where you came from! Get back in the kitchen! Get back in the closet! Just back off!), with the magical thinking extending all the way through time travel that takes America back to the good old days (the saddest dream because of its sheer unattainability).

And yet look at how hard some of us will try. Trump himself never left the 1980s, so why should anybody else who believes in him like the Savior?

So, sure, when you add up all these confusing and conflicting dynamics, the world does seem defined by volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA!), and thus the way to combat all that is to turn back our cultural clocks to a simpler time when men were men and women were women and only those two genders were allowed, focused as we all were on procreation as our prime religious directive.

[Noted lucky Thomas — Eight of Nine.]

Admittedly, that back-to-the-future stuff is hard to pull off, as the younger generations just ain’t buying it, which only pushes the hardcore types to get ever more cruel in their show-trial-like abuse heaped upon the most vulnerable and thus easily targeted avatars of the future they seek to prevent — presently, the transgenders who threaten all pillars of good society!

Oh, the ambiguity of it all …

Of course, that choice of target only reveals the moral bankruptcy of those leading the back-to-the-future charge: they have no answers, only villains to be squashed.

How dare they pursue their own happiness if it calls into question my own!

Not to insult Native Americans (which the following does), but the whole thing is so Ghost Dance-like — the sheer pathos of symbology totally detached from the real world’s correlation of powers, dynamics, and inevitabilities.

Crawl under the sheets and pray the monsters go away.

I remember the instinct.

I am the first to admit it: modernity is a bitch! Capable of demolishing just about all tradition and culture in its path. But such is the nature of progress — and progressivism (that evil word!): people evolve all the faster, the more freedom and empowerment they enjoy, and yeah, the information technology revolution drives all that at high speed — self-actualization at levels sure to dismay any parent (Where did we go wrong?), when, of course, we’ve done nothing wrong; we just timed out as we aged, leaving all the key shaping dynamics of our world to the young who respect not that which came before them: always a good thing even as it is a tough thing, because this is how we evolve, and — man — do we humans need to pick up the pace right now.

So, yeah, the world does seem very VUCA right now, with “daddy” (globalization’s progenitor America) in such a weird way right now, simultaneously deporting one set of unwashed masses while covetously eyeing others — or just their land — for acquisition.

Make up your fucking mind! Are we pulling up the drawbridge or settling the frontier?

Trump rather perfectly embodies those tensions, those contradictions, those animal spirits. As always, we Americans get the leaders we deserve — our mirror image.