Thomas Barnett - Is Globalization Humanity's Greatest Achievement?

For the sensitive globally conscious citizen today, with climate change looming and a financial system that has broken down, it is often easy to assume that we’re heading in the wrong direction. “We’ve become addicted to pessimism,” writes Esquire editor in chief David Granger in a recent editorial. That’s why it’s so refreshing—and enlightening—to hear the sophisticated optimism of “grand strategist” Thomas Barnett, whose new book, Great Powers: America and the World After Bush, may be the perfect antidote for the doom-and-gloomism that often defines our cultural zeitgeist.

In this feature interview from the June-August 2009 issue of EnlightenNext magazine, Barnett explains to executive editor Carter Phipps why he thinks that things are better today than they ever have been. Combining a futurist’s sense of hope and optimism with a historian’s sense of sobriety and context, Barnett argues that despite its bad rap, the widespread globalization of Western-style capitalism and democracy over the past half century may actually be the most unifying, progressive, and liberating force in human history.

In the second half of the interview, Barnett picks apart several of the most prominent anti-modernist arguments, while painting a decidedly optimistic picture of the road ahead. To those who claim the current financial crisis is proof of globalization’s inherent unsustainability, he suggests that this economic downturn is really “a healthy corrective to a twenty-seven year global boom.” In response to claims that America’s involvement in the developing world has caused more harm than good, he points out that the most peaceful and prosperous regions of the planet are those that are the most plugged in to the global economy. And finally, responding to the perception that the twentieth century has been the most violent in history, he argues that the Cold War has led, for the first time in human history, to the elimination of the threat of major warfare between powerful nations.

BIO

Dr. Thomas P.M. Barnett is Senior Managing Director of the strategic consulting firm Enterra Solutions, a bestselling author, and a nationally known public speaker. Having worked in national security affairs since the end of the Cold War, he is considered one of the world’s foremost forecasters of global conflict and a leading expert in military transformation, international security, and economic globalization.

Dr. Barnett is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Pentagon’s New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century (2004), Blueprint for Action: A Future Worth Creating (2005), and his forthcoming Great Powers: America and the World After Bush. Barnett is also a prolific blogger on current global events through his website www.thomaspmbarnett.com, which counts among its regular readers representatives from all the major U.S. military commands, most of the U.S. federal departments, numerous foreign governments, and major international research and corporate entities. Barnett is also a contributing editor to Esquire, and has written for Wired and the Washington Post.

Barnett holds a PhD in political science from Harvard University. From 1998 to 2004 he was a researcher and a professor in the Warfare Analysis & Research Department at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, where he served as a senior advisor to the offices of the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Staff, Central Command, Special Operations Command, and Joint Forces Command.