Who is Thomas P. M. Barnett?
03.12.2008 - 11:14 AMIn the LA Times today, Max Boot effectively takes down the Esquire profile of Admiral William Fallon, who just resigned as head the U.S. Central Command in a spat with the Bush administration over Iran policy:
Its author, Thomas P.M. Barnett, a former professor at the Naval War College, presents a fawning portrait of the admiral — a service he previously performed for Donald Rumsfeld. But evidence of Fallon’s supposed “strategic brilliance” is notably lacking. For example, Barnett notes Fallon’s attempt to banish the phrase “the Long War” (created by his predecessor) because it “signaled a long haul that Fallon simply finds unacceptable,” without offering any hint of how Fallon intends to defeat our enemies overnight. The ideas Fallon proposes — “He wants troop levels in Iraq down now, and he wants the Afghan National Army running the show throughout most of Afghanistan by the end of this year” — would most likely result in security setbacks that would lengthen, not shorten, the struggle.
Max calls Barnett’s portrait “fawning.” Max is a master of understatement. Here are some excerpts:
The first thing you notice is the face, the second is the voice.
A tall, wiry man with thinning white hair, Fallon comes off like a loner even when he’s standing in a crowd.
Despite having an easy smile that he regularly pulls out for his many daily exercises in relationship building, Fallon’s consistent game face is a slightly pissed-off glare. It’s his default expression. Don’t fuck with me, it says. A tough Catholic boy from New Jersey, his favorite compliment is “badass.” Fallon’s got a fearsome reputation, although no one I ever talk to in the business can quite pin down why.
And in truth, Fallon’s not a screamer. Indeed, by my long observation and the accounts of a dozen people, he doesn’t raise his voice whatsoever, except when he laughs. Instead, the more serious he becomes, the quieter he gets, and his whispers sound positively menacing. Other guys can jaw-jaw all they want about the need for war-war with . . . whomever is today’s target among D.C.’s many armchair warriors. Not Fallon. Let the president pop off. Fallon won’t. No bravado here, nor sound-bite-sized threats, but rather a calm, leathery presence. Fallon is comfortable risking peace because he’s comfortable waging war.
Along with such treacle, the Esquire portrait also contains a dose of the same kind of poison pedaled by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt. Barnett writes that Fallon’s articulation of a soft line toward Iran amounts to “fighting words to your average neocon — not to mention your average supporter of Israel, a good many of whom in Washington seem never to have served a minute in uniform. But utter those words for print and you can easily find yourself defending your indifference to ‘nuclear holocaust.’” Thanks largely to Mearsheimer and Walt, this kind of Charles Lindbergh-Henry Ford-style discourse has seeped into the discourse of even third-rate hacks.
But perhaps even more notable is Barnett’s account of Fallon’s travel to a Chinese city when he was in charge of American forces in the Pacific:
Early in his tenure at Pacific Command, Fallon let it be known that he was interested in visiting the city of Harbin in the highly controlled and isolated Heilongjiang Military District on China’s northern border with Russia. The Chinese were flabbergasted at the request, but when Fallon’s command plane took off one afternoon from Mongolia, heading for Harbin without permission, Beijing relented.
Did a U.S. military aircraft really enter Chinese airspace without permission? Under what circumstances are U.S. military aircraft ever granted permission to fly over China, let alone over a military district? What really happened here? My first bet is that either Barnett made this stuff up or he was sold a bill of goods by the man with the “calm, leathery presence.” I knew Barnett back in grad school at Harvard, and my second bet is the latter.
Barnett became famous at Harvard for another fawning article he wrote, in this case about the Romanian tyrant Nicolae Ceausescu. Describing Ceausescu as a “shrewd and farsighted politician,” Barnett noted that the Romanian leader had recently been “unanimously reelected at the recent Communist Party congress,” and his “grip on power appears firm.” Barnett’s op-ed appeared in the Christian Science Monitor on December 11, 1989. Fourteen days later, Romania was in full revolt and Ceausescu was dead — not of natural causes.
Let’s put aside Admiral Fallon’s views on Iran. If for nothing else, he deserved to be relieved of his command for collaborating with such a malign goofball in anything, let alone a campaign of insubordination.
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March 12th, 2008 at 12:55 PM
“I knew Barnett back in grad school at Harvard”
That explains a lot. Thomas Barnett seems to be the typical pseudoeducated Harvard University graduate. The number one concern in their life is to be “hip and with it.” They place their wet finger into the air to see which way the leftist Zeitgeist is blowing. Barnett also reminds me of the arrogant David Halberstam who is responsible for the deaths of thousands in Vietnam. Harvard literally threatens the very survival of Western Civilization. This school has done so much damage.
March 12th, 2008 at 2:04 PM
So you knew Barnett? His book The Pentagon’s New Map is worth reading, as a key to how things work in his mind. The introductory pages reminded me of nothing so much as that deservedly short-lived TV series, “The E-Ring,” in which we were invited to marvel at the incredible drama of a mid-grade officer staffing things — using the ACTUAL STAFFING FORMS; wow! — in the Pentagon. Anyone who’s ever had to staff something in this venue had to collapse from laughter in the first episode — and is unlikely to be impressed by Barnett’s personal odyssey.
But the substance of the book itself is filled with Barnett Buzzwords describing Today’s Geopolitical Phenomena — Buzzwords that could easily do double duty for naming ultrahip apparel boutiques in Malibu: “the Core,” “the Gap,” “Lesser Includeds.” The interplay of economics, politics, and social trends is always downshifting or going into overdrive in this MTV-hip world, scenarios are horizontal except when they’re vertical, and with disconnectedness defining danger, we may be sure that there just aren’t enough rule sets being administered, and a System Perturbation is in the offing.
What it all boils down to is that the military must be TRANSFORMED. The flavor of this necessity can be best conveyed with a quotation from p. 298:
“America’s task is not perpetual war, nor the extension of empire. It is merely to serve as globalization’s bodyguard wherever and whenever needed through the Gap. This is a boundable problem with a foreseeable finish line. Moreover, if properly reconfigured, our military currently possesses all the skill sets needed to play both Leviathan across the Gap and ’system administrator’ to the Core’s ever-deepening security community. It is not a question of ‘paying any price’ but rather being far more explicit — both with ourselves and our allies — about what America seeks to achieve through the application of military force in this global war on terrorism. In short, we need to make clear to all — but especially to ourselves — that the American way of war serves a purpose far higher than merely assuring this country’s security or imposing its justice upon others. To achieve this lofty aim requires nothing less than recasting the structure of the U.S. military…”
This is a man who has talked himself into a slickly cast but basically foolish view of the world, through an extensive course of what in we uniform used to call PowerPoint Therapy. (An Air Force major friend and I used to refer to ourselves as being “in group” when we had to attend the endless policy meetings built around PowerPoint presentations.) It’s not so much that Barnett’s analytical framework of Core, Gap etc is all wet — although it is somewhat damp — as that his conclusions from it about “how we shall then live” are quite a walk across the water.
His book reminded me a lot, in its “self-licking ice cream cone” character, of Thomas Schelling’s Cold War classic, The Strategy of Conflict. Schelling famously used game theory to show that traditional uses of force were no longer viable in the nuclear age. And he made some interesting points, but you sure wouldn’t want to take his musings for action (one of our biggest Cold War problems was that we did).
In the course of setting up a theoretical discussion, Schelling posited the following: “The sophisticated negotiator may find it difficult to seem as obstinate as a truly obstinate man. If a man knocks at a door and says that he will stab himself on the porch unless given $10, he is more likely to get the $10 if his eyes are bloodshot.” To a sensible person, this beautifully exposes the shortcomings of the sophisticated negotiator. I don’t know what y’all do up at Harvard about things like this, but back in Oklahoma, we have all the requisite coping skills for such an eventuality. Our strategy is dominated by the words “twelve” and “gauge.”
It takes a heap of theorizing to get to where a Barnett or a Schelling ends up — and a heap of disconnectedness from reality. On the subject of Fallon himself, a tour at Pacific Command, where the 4-star has operated with surprising autonomy since the end of the Cold War (making as much of our Far East policy as executing the president’s), set him up poorly for the greater presidential supervision CENTCOM is currently under. Some flag officers could handle the transition, but Fallon wasn’t one of them.
It’s not a big, nefarious thing that policy in neglected theaters is made, de facto, by Naval officers; it has always been thus, because unlike the Army, the Navy is always in contact forward. But this would have been a tough transition for some senior officers, and clearly it was for Fallon.
March 13th, 2008 at 6:34 AM
Max Boot is probably right about both Thomas Barnett and Admiral Fallon, certainly from the tiny peak his brief posting offers.
But I am not sure Fallon’s intuition, that we are being mislead into accepting the necessity of “the Long War”, is so wrong.
We are so sure that there are no easy answers, so habituated to: there is no free lunch, so intend on being “responsible” and convinced that Islamism, like Soviet Communism, requires a long haul effort, that we ignore the possibility that it might not. And in the meantime a huge industry is taking root, whose bread and butter depends on there being a “long haul.”
We refuse to consider that there might be a swift and even easy way to defeat today’s enemy.
My web site offers such a possible solution.
March 13th, 2008 at 8:41 PM
Fallon sounds like he was a bit of a potentate, especially after reading Dyer’s comment. When the Admiral came under closer supervision and could no longer slide through as many of his policies as he was accustomed to, he resigned in a fit of pique.
Speaking personally, I’m not comfortable with that kind of girlish behaviour coming from an Admiral–especially one who is used to making as many policy decisions as he did.
It’s scary to think of how many more there are like him in similar positions of responsibility.
March 14th, 2008 at 10:43 AM
David Thomson, is Harvard really any worse than a zillion other universities?
March 14th, 2008 at 11:42 AM
[…] I wrote about Thomas P. M. Barnett, the author of the Esquire profile of Admiral Willam Fallon, head of […]
March 15th, 2008 at 1:01 PM
Bob Miller:
The halls of Harvard are trod by those poor souls who couldn’t manage admission to Dartmouth.