Battle of the Books

Over the past month I read the two following books:

The Pentagon’s New Map

America’s Secret War

Now it’s time for my hard-hitting review as the optimistic futurist takes on the old school hardened analyst in a battle that decides the fate of our world!

Let me first tackle PNM: This book is a must read for anyone interested in current events. This is some of the best “thinking outside of the box” that I have seen in a while. Barnett’s theory of the Gap and the Core really makes sense, and he takes it one step further with his suggestion that rules change depending on which group you are in. “Disconnectedness defines danger” is an eloquent and well-structured argument that fleshes out the truly underlying attributes of the problematic theory that “democracies don’t war with one another.” The few complaints I have about this book, include the following: I found it far too repetitive, you could probably shave off about 50 pages; and it reads like a repackaged Manifest Destiny. This book is definitely written for Americans. I agree with his point that the US contains the “source code” for liberal democracies, but I felt that he over-emphasized this, disregarding the numerous fully functional alternative “code branches” out there, and their ability to contribute to “a future worth building.”

Now onto America’s Secret War. George Friedman, the founder of Stratfor, makes an analysis of the US war on terror starting prior to the 9/11 attacks and ending with Abu Ghraib. The interesting thing about this book is Friedman’s ability to guide the reader through complex geopolitics; it is almost like reading a good Clancy novel. Each event is lined up precisely with an accompanying logical explanation and analysis. Unfortunately with the lack of any references it all seems like a well-constructed fairy tale, told in 20/20 Hindsight-o-vision. If only he provided footnotes… Friedman is a great analyst but his “order of battle analysis” skills are not on par with true historians like Sir John Keegan. In any case this book is a great lesson in geopolitical analysis and sure gets you looking at events with a different lense. Although a must read for die hard armchair cold-warriors and geopoliphiles alike, I wouldn’t recommend it to “regular folk” like I would PNM.

These two books turned out to be on very different topics (future vs. the past), and are written by very different authors (new school vs. old school), but I was glad that I read them in close succession. One of the niggles of PNM is that it feels like he is calling for all Core nations to hold hands and sing from the same page together in shrinking the Gap. This, in my realist upbringing, is an impossibility, comrade. But while reading Friedman’s concise description of the geopolitical landscape, with alliances being formed and broken depending on the task, I realized the profundity of Barnett’s grand strategy. For all his idealism of ending war in our world, Barnett wasn’t necessarily saying that we all had to work together all the time, he does leave room for variances in foreign policy. His is truly a grand strategy, leaving the day-today geopolitics to guys like Friedman.

That is my short take on these books. So what is the fate of our world? Well… not necessarily the same as it has always been. But in the meantime there will be that familiar struggle…