Thomas P.M. Barnett, what`s "The Pentagon`s New Map"?

And the mantra I use in the book is that it`s disconnectedness that defines danger. If you think about globalization as a process of integration, then...

Before we get into some of your theories, I want to go through what`s written about you in the back and just quickly get you to -- the word that we...

... so that we can an idea of where you`re coming from. Senior strategic researcher and professor at the U.S. Naval War College from October 2001 to...

One of the key things I did during that time period was I ran a series of workshops with Cantor Fitzgerald, atop the World Trade Center, where we brought...

So Art Zabrowsky calls me soon after 9/11, knowing that my project`s been shot out from under me, somewhat literally, and says, Come work for me. We...

And that receives good purchase within this administration. They let me brief it all over. It becomes an "Esquire" article. That becomes a book. That`s...

Office of the secretary of defense.

Department of Defense.

It`s in Newport, Rhode Island.

You`re going to see a staff of 200 or 300. They`re going to process officers, graduate degrees, about 500 or 600 a year, from all over the U.S. military,...

They get a master`s in national security studies.

That`s in Alexandria, Virginia. That`s where I started when I got out of Harvard with a Ph.D back in 1990, at the end of the cold war.

That is a federally funded research development center. It`s like the Rand Corporation. It basically works for the Department of Navy, although it has...

A lot of them do. And a lot of them do what they call operations research, kind of -- they`re scientists. I was sort of an odd duck there, in that I...

That`s a division within the CNA Corporation.

Yes, there are those kinds of -- those kinds of federally funded research and development centers and there are private corporations that do that kind...

Right.

Well, I mean, what was frustrating for me, going through and getting a Ph.D. in political science in the 1980s was that all the rules with regard to...

You live where now?

And other than writing this book, what do you do for a living?

What is strategic planning? In other words, what other kind of planning is there?

And that`s fascinating. It`s challenging. But when you think about it, what the Pentagon really does primarily, as opposed to the commands around the...

Why that doesn`t penetrate up the ranks in the Pentagon is that the Pentagon decided in the mid-1990s, when they got far enough away from the old Soviet...

So when the Pentagon is focused on that definition of future war and is building for that and only wants to hear intelligence that supports that, people...

OK.

Right.

Well, I`m a registered Democrat. I tend to vote Democrat. It`s an odd thing to be a Democrat who works with the military, which is overwhelming Republican....

In Wisconsin, for the Senate. And so that`s the kind of background I come from. I will tell you, though, I tend to describe myself more like a Tony...

Assistant for strategic futures in the Office of Force Transformation.

Right.

No. I mean, that`s one of those Pentagon buzz terms. What it means is this is the office that imagines the changing nature of war and is trying to get...

Art Zabrowsky.

He is the director of the Office of Force Transformation in the office of the secretary of defense.

Don Rumsfeld, secretary of defense.

Right.

Right. Well, I think what you`re going to find when you read the book is it is written -- it avoids the jargon, by and large, and it is written in a...

What`s a Power Point briefing?

What`s it look like?

You actually say in the book you`re pretty good at this.

Well, I basically do something like that, except the tableau that`s behind me is the future of warfare and I`m describing where the world is going,...

Well, one of the arguments that I make is that if you`re going to be serious about a global war on terrorism, what you`re going to end up having to...

It isn`t...

Globalization is a connectivity of communication networks. It`s a connectivity of people travel, idea movement. It`s connectivity of economic trade...

So I talk about a core, a functioning core of the global economy, which is roughly two thirds of the world`s population. And then I distinguish that...

The gap. What I call the non-integrating gap.

Right.

That is poorly integrated to the global economy.

I would run it from left to right on a map. It`s the Caribbean rim. It`s the Andes portion of South America. It`s most of Africa. It`s the Balkans....

For me, 1990. So I`m talking about the last 14 years. Where have we gone? Because the Soviets go away and we get out of the bipolar competition with...

A hundred and fifty times. And all I did was, I drew a line around that -- that figure.

And you have that map in the book.

They`re not always democracies, though.

I`ve got to stop you again because you use this a lot -- rules set.

Sets, S-E-T-S.

Rules -- is it rule sets?

OK, rule sets.

Yes. And you use that all the time.

What is a rule set?

And you say it`s changed in 1776 and in -- jumping ahead to 1861, or all the years, it seems like, when war happened.

Here`s an example. You get connectivity in the Internet, and you have new definitions of dangers, like stalking on the Internet. And until you create...

OK.

Well, here`s that argument about disconnectedness defines danger. So I look at the world and I say, Show me the places that are poorly connected, I`ll...

So when I see a Kim Jong Il and I see that kind of disconnectedness, I say, by definition, this is a bad guy. And I will argue, if you want to make...

I`ve given probably a thousand or more.

Anywhere from -- I do -- sometimes -- I`ve done ones for senior leaders, where it`s the one guy in the room, and I`ve done them for as many as 500 or...

Well, there are a lot of people who get Power Point briefings. What I get told a lot after Power Point briefings is that they`ve never seen anything...

No.

G.P. Putnam`s Sons.

Serious house.

A mass -- a mass book.

Yes. Not a trade publication, in effect.

Well, I`ll tell you, I spent most of my career across the `90s making these arguments about how national security had to come closer and understand...

And so I started briefing it outside of DoD, and on that basis, I started briefing it to private sector industries, like international financial community,...

They ask around. They`re told, Hey, you got to see this guy. He`s got this brief. It`s weird as hell. He gives it all the time. He`s kind of a cult...

I mean, the fear factor in the American public is, in effect, Where are we going with this? I mean, we`re going to do Afghanistan. We`re going to do...

Well, let me get -- let me get all the way to the book here, and then I`ll answer that question.

Because I have a tendency to jump around, and it makes it harder for...

(LAUGHTER)

At that point, the agents start coming after you, and they say you`ve got to take this message to the American public. And I say, you know, I`m a weird...

So I have to explain who I am and how I came up with all of these things for it to be a sellable concept, for people to say I not only believe it, but...

But in the end, you actually probably reach more people through "Esquire" magazine than you do through the book sales, right?

George Bush.

The way I look at it, George Bush is, I say he`s very much like a Harry Truman. He`s at a point much like after the second world war, where we`re confronting...

I try to deliver that in this book. I mean, I sell it quite openly as a successor to the Cold War strategy of containment. Like they did back then,...

I make the argument that if you want to deal with terrorism, I mean, there are like three ways you can deal with terrorism, roughly. You can put a firewall...

I think what you have to do is you have to deny terrorists and terrorist networks the outcomes they seek. And I would argue that the outcomes they seek,...

And when I see that kind of disconnectedness develop between large chunks of humanity, invariably they start looking at each other as enemies. And there`s...

Now, how do you tie an Iraq situation into that? The only way you`re going to deny the terrorists the outcomes they seek in the Middle East is to connect...

Now, to do that you have to take out those entities or those agents within that security community there, which is very insecure, I would argue, who...

So when we take down an Iraq and try to connect an Iraqi society to the outside world, we create, and I would argue what the Bush administration argues...

I think it`s a good idea. I think it`s a long term idea, and I think the way it was sold to the American public was probably not so good. And I think...

We do not have one for processing a bad, politically bankrupt leadership that nobody wants, that everybody wants to see gone. OK? So the world wanted...

Let me read a quote from your book, to see if you remember this quote. "Don`t those idiots in the White House realize they`re destroying the concept...

That`s a fairly stable rule set. OK? There has been no war among great powers since we invented nuclear weapons well over half a century ago. OK?

So when Bush and this administration effectively enunciate the concept of preemptive war, what I say is, you got to understand, there are two different...

Yes, she is.

She lives in Boscobel.

Small town, southwest Wisconsin. She has just published the third volume of her compendium, which examines the history of female protagonists in English...

An Edgar is the award for mystery writers.

She has -- she met my dad in law school in the mid-1940s, after the second world war. My dad was in the Navy. She quit law school. Had nine children....

She is very much a Democrat.

My father just passed away about a month ago.

Yes.

He was 81. He was a small-town attorney for about 45 years. He was -- he was Atticus Finch.

Yes, he was. He was a Kennedy delegate. A lot of Republicans go on further back. His dad was a staunch Republican. Always blamed my mother for turning...

And your wife is a Democrat?

So by -- did they get mad at you for supplying this document here that -- it reinforces what George Bush is doing.

So, I see a lot of good things in this administration in terms of the responses they`ve made to change the Defense Department and to change national...

You tell us on a number of occasions in the book you`re a Catholic. Why is that important to know?

So throughout my career, I`ve been very good at getting grades or promotions and those kinds of things throughout an academic research sort of a career,...

So I`ve spent a career, almost a decade and a half, trying to figure out how the world works and how it makes sense to argue that America plays an important...

I`m 41.

When she was 2.

12.

Well, it impacted me a lot in the sense that, you know, I`ve come to Washington to be a political military analyst, to be a policy wonk of any sort....

When Emily has her cancer and it reorders your sense of priorities and what you want out of life. I decided at that point I was going to stop being...

And what the War College offered up in Newport was this unique research partnership with Cantor Fitzgerald, the bond trader firm, where they had asked...

Well, from Cantor Fitzgerald, I think it was upwards of -- somewhere between 650 and 700. About two-thirds of the people.

I knew quite a few of them. I mean, we did a series of workshops there. All of them were at World Trade -- World Trade Center 1, on the 107th floor,...

How many days had you been -- before you had been in the World Trade Center on September the 11th?

But I mean, how soon before that happened had you been there?

But again, September 11 situation is a need for a new rule set?

Have we got them yet?

The Patriot Act is a new rule set, which scares some people and makes other people feel more secure.

In your book, talking about -- you have got a big book here talking about the Pentagon map and the future and rule sets. But on page 365, you start...

And you say: "I simply cannot watch most of these shows for more than a minute or two without sensing that my strategic IQ is dropping with each idiotic...

... because questions are what keeps you from tuning in, but the cumulative result of this flood of unanswered answers is a public that often feels...

And the public needs that kind of reporting to a certain extent, but with 24-hour broadcast news networks, we also need to see a lot more discussion...

I have. I briefed Mac Thornberry`s group on the Hill.

And I briefed the House of Commons over in England.

Absolutely. Absolutely.

They are. They`re thinking very strategically. But you know what? The material that`s developed there that drives a lot of these decisions creates these...

Absolutely. And that`s one of the reasons why I wanted to take down a Kim Jong Il. Because I see, for example, right now, a plan within the Pentagon...

Well, they say it`s about North Korea. What anybody who looks at this picture notices automatically is China is on the other side of that line too....

And driving policy. Right.

Right.

I think it`s more than enough. I mean, if all you want to do is defend this country, I can defend the country for about $100 billion. If we`re spending...

I think it`s a very good idea, because I think we`re the only country that can actually pull it off. And that when we do that, we create peace and prosperity...

That`s the question I was going to make -- that was the point I was going to make.

Did you ever have people like Paul Wolfowitz or, to jump to the political side, Karl Rove call you up and say, go Tom go, we love what you`re saying?

I try to stay out of that Paul Wolfowitz/Karl Rove kind of level, because once you get caught up in it -- it`s -- you get politicized. And I prefer...

My mother named my Thomas Patrick Barnett. When I took my wife in marriage, she said if I`m taking your last name, you`re taking my last name. I said...

Thanks for having me, sir.