The Pentagon's New Map - Thomas Barnett

P.22-23
I obsess instead about “rules,” or all the procedures, laws, treaties, rules of thumb, and conventional wisdom that seem to guide the actions of individuals, corporations, governments, and the international community at large. I focus on rules because wherever I find them in healthy abundance (read quality, not quantity), I know the U.S. Military’s role in enforcing them will be small, because once you have rules, you typically have rule enforcers built into the system (e.g., our very robust and distributed U.S. law enforcement network of federal, state, and local police). Likewise, wherever rules are clear because most players in that system agree they’re good, there’s not as much enforcement required, because most participants simply decide on their own that playing by the rules is the best course of action. But where you don’t find generally agreed-upon rules, or where rules are out of whack or misaligned across social sectors, then you’re talking about the future of instability, the potential for misperceptions leading to conflicts, and the clash of competing rule sets.

P.26
Simply put, when we see countries moving toward the acceptance of globalization’s economic rule sets, we should expect to see commensurate acceptance of an emerging global security rule set- in effect, agreement on why, and under what conditions, war makes sense.

P.29
…for I’m a huge believer in the free flow of mass media, ideas, capital, goods, technology, and people. Rather, we didn’t construct sufficient political and security rule sets to keep pace with all this growing connectivity. In some ways, we got lazy, counted a little too much on the market to sort it all out, and then woke up shocked and amazed on 9/11 to find ourselves apparently invited to a global war.

P.43
“It is an enduring conflict between those who want to see disconnected societies like Saddam’s Iraq join the global community defined by globalization’s Functioning Core and others societies from being – in their minds- assimilated into a “sacrilegious global economic empire” lorded over by the United States.”

Barnett, Thomas P.M. 2004. The Pentagon’s New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century. Berkley Books: New York.

On Creativity

One man’s creative leap can be the same for another, so long as the next man was unaware of the last man’s actions. As Nozick put it:

“It is trite to say that everything is like everything else in some respects, perhaps highly artificial ones, and different in others. Whether we call something new and different will depend in part on what pigeonholes of classification we actually have. Does it fall into the same category as previously known things or require a new category of its own?”

On Terrorists

“We have seen their kind before. They are the heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the 20th century. By sacrificing human life to serve their radical visions—be abandoning every value except the will to power—they follow in the path of fascism, and Nazism, and Totalitarianism. And they will follow that path all the way, to where it ends: in history’s unmarked grave of discarded lies.”

-George W. Bush

9.20.2001 Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People