baltimoron 4/22/2008 |
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English
“The secret to confounding asymmetrical warriors is anticipating and preparing for what they will do before they can do it.”1 Barnett is surely right when he argues that responding to asymmetrical attacks like al-Qaeda’s is “…going to involve a whole lot more than just the Defense Department.”2 Mancur Olson’s “logic of collective” action would make that Herculean task, confounding the unknown, even more hopeless. The logic “…predicts that those groups that have access to selective incentives will be more likely to act collectively to obtain collective goods than those that do not, and that smaller groups will have a greater likelihood of engaging in collective action than larger ones.”3 The “vision thing” cannot stand up to interest-group politics, which, in the end, will dictate political strategy and the military with which America enters the next fight.
Barnett’s “big something”, the “military-market nexus” is his major contribution to the response to the asymmetrical attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. However, then he divides humanity into two conditions based on geopolitical, cultural, and economic factors, the Hobbesian and Kantian, where Rousseau’s contribution is sufficient. Barnett also offers globalization as a panacea for the “lesser-includeds”, when Dani Rodrik and even a hyperglobalist such as Jagdish Bhagwati are far less certain. Barnett assigns the U.S. Defense Department the largest role when even he criticizes two administrations’ responses to the tough issues facing this country following the fall of the Soviet Union and the 911 attacks. Diagnosing those debacles is another singular service his book renders. Abjuring any pretensions in that vein, he rejects imperialism for “benevolent hegemony”, by framing 911 as a second Pearl Harbor fit for a second Truman. In the process he discounts the one of the Cold War’s unsung achievements, layers of multilateral global non-governmental networks. Indeed, Barnett’ ... more>>