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Loading... The Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-first Centuryby Thomas P.M. Barnett
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. I think that the author has a point with the stuff he says in his book. (  )Conner23456 | May 27, 2009 |   An important work that attempts to demonstrate the direction that the Pentagon will have to make in the 21st Century. He points out that Islam has "bleeding borders," anywhere that Islam rubs against other cultures, it bleeds, or sheds the blood of others. This work fuels related books such as Samuel Huntington's, Clash of Civilizations. Barnett states: 1) The world is divided into a Functioning Core and a Non-Integrating Group; 2) Connectivity is the primary method to define and influence which countries move into the Functioning Core; and 3) Economic relationships have replaced military power. He seems to be postulating a realistic appraisal of Pentagon efforts and is less ideologically committed than many books of the same ilk. I believe it could be read profitably by many whether a person is a conservative or a liberal. gmicksmith | Aug 10, 2008 | Barnett?s book started out strong, but it became less credible towards the end. His contention that much of what ails the earth is due to a lack of connectedness is a reasonable one, and it explains a lot, but it doesn?t explain everything. I need to go r jaygheiser | Jul 23, 2008 | A Clarion Call for a New World View This is one of those rare books that set your mind’s inner light bulbs flashing. Thomas P. M. Barnett, professor at the U.S. Naval War College, posits a worldwide perspective that integrates political, economic and military elements as a model for the post September 11th world. He argues well-written book that terrorism and globalization have ended the great-power model of war that has dominated foreign policy thinkers during the past 400 years. He calls globalization "this country’s gift to history." Building on the thinking of Thomas Friedman and Francis Fukuyama, the author distills recent history into three pertinent observations: 1. The world is divided into a Functioning Core and a Non-Integrating Group. 2. Connectivity is the primary method to define and influence which countries move into the Functioning Core. 3. Economic relationships have replaced military power. Wherever you stand on recent events Barnett’s book promises to provide a platform for a thoughtful and meaningful debate over our country’s role in the world. (  )PointedPundit | Mar 23, 2008 | 1  Many good ideas here. The book gets surprisingly personal at points, with Barnett recounting his own experiences and emotions as part of his explanation of Defense Department analysis processes. Extremely arrogant. Many of his policy recommendations and his sense of the scope of U.S. power seem hopelessly naive in hindsight after several years mired in Iraq. Other recommendations seem prescient. Colonial perspective on developing world -- for instance, he is overly skeptical about Africans finding home-grown solutions to African problems. This leads him to promote a strategy of military intervention and occupation more than foreign direct investment, to a greater extent than I think warranted. uqbar | Sep 4, 2007 | 0.043 seconds to build listing  no reviews | add a review
Amazon.com (ISBN 0425202399, Paperback)This bold and important book strives to be a practical "strategy for a Second American Century." In this brilliantly argued work, Thomas Barnett calls globalization "this country’s gift to history" and explains why its wide dissemination is critical to the security of not only America but the entire world. As a senior military analyst for the U.S. Naval War College, Barnett is intimately familiar with the culture of the Pentagon and the State Department (both of which he believes are due for significant overhauls). He explains how the Pentagon, still in shock at the rapid dissolution of the once evil empire, spent the 1990s grasping for a long-term strategy to replace containment. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Barnett argues, revealed the gap between an outdated Cold War-era military and a radically different one needed to deal with emerging threats. He believes that America is the prime mover in developing a "future worth creating" not because of its unrivaled capacity to wage war, but due to its ability to ensure security around the world. Further, he believes that the U.S. has a moral responsibility to create a better world and the way he proposes to do that is by bringing all nations into the fold of globalization, or what he calls connectedness. Eradicating disconnectedness, therefore, is "the defining security task of our age." His stunning predictions of a U.S. annexation of much of Latin America and Canada within 50 years as well as an end to war in the foreseeable future guarantee that the book will be controversial. And that's good. The Pentagon's New Map deserves to be widely discussed. Ultimately, however, the most impressive aspects of the book is not its revolutionary ideas but its overwhelming optimism. Barnett wants the U.S. to pursue the dream of global peace with the same zeal that was applied to preventing global nuclear war with the former Soviet Union. High-level civilian policy makers and top military leaders are already familiar with his vision of the future—this book is a briefing for the rest of us and it cannot be ignored. --Shawn Carkonen(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:01 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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