Page 2 of 2 INTERVIEW Redefining America's global role
leadership, and we need them to take more responsibility in
response to the bad things that happen around the world. We have probably
caught the next generation of leadership in China too soon - they aren't quite
ready yet. They are still learning that language, which, if delivered badly on
the international stage, can cause things to escalate.
We also need them to be more experimental while they are conscious of how they
impact the world - not just saying "we're here to do business". As an example,
the US and China have complimentary roles in Africa. We see a ton of bad things
happening in Africa with a limited ability of our military to deal with
al-Qaeda popping up. When Chinese go to Africa they say "I see something not
that different from home"; they are in a frontier-integrating mode (just like
in China's western interior) and we need them to take some additional
responsibility for the role they are going to play in Africa.
Africa is a tabula rosa for the US, India and China - none of us have colonial
interests there. Instead, we now have overlapping, complimentary interests. So
we could do good things and set good examples of how to reach the bottom of the
pyramid with environmentally friendly products and technologies and
infrastructure development.
Benjamin A Shobert: Which of your 12 Steps has the recent
financial turbulence made least likely and the most problematic?
Tom Barnett: On some level, the temptation is to start with the
first one, admit that Americans are powerless over globalization: the knee-jerk
reaction in times of stress is that you do things to protect yourself. You
could pursue every advantage you can within the existing rule-set to do this,
but if you start to break rules, it's a sign of desperation. That mindset is
probably the biggest obstacle.
The last step [that America must try to sell the grand strategy to the world
and make globalization truly global], is sort of like the culminating statement
of Alcoholics Anonymous: we've gone through the first 11 steps and now we're
going to go through life confidently and spread the good news [about
globalization]. These two steps are sort of the alpha and omega of my vision.
Consequently, no one can screw it up like we can by forgetting who we are. The
rest of the system recognizes that we are its progenitor - when they see us
break a rule we send a signal to the rest of the world that they can as well.
In the short term you may get what you want, but in the longer term you'll
trigger fear, which you don't want.
Benjamin A Shobert: Can you narrow that concern down to what you
believe Americans need to do, be mindful of and advocate for from their
leaders?
Tom Barnett: Read about our history during our post-Civil War
integration of the American West and how we knitted together a sectional
economy into a networked, continental economy. Look at how bad and nasty we
were back then. The booms and busts we went through back then are highly
predictive of what others are going to go through now as we knit together
regional economies into a truly globalized one.
Back then, our internal integration process was tough, with lots of unequal
growth, and we needed periods where things recalibrated - when the ethos of
people like Horatio Alger flourished - self-made men. These times were also
when many of our community groups were founded and our leisure society began.
We can translate those past dynamics to China, and apply what we learned to the
emerging global middle class. We need to ask ourselves how we can encourage
civic institutions and the soft power they represent within these countries.
We also have to look at how we view religious institutions, to see them as a
way of enabling positive transformative change in cultures. As many of these
countries experience dramatic change, they wrestle with how to hold onto a
moral code. There was much goodness that came out of the various “great
awakenings” of religious fervor in the United States. In many ways, as we
became more religious as a society, we also became more pluralistic and
nondenominational (ie, tolerant of competition among religions for believers).
This allows for a certain personal stability for all of us: I maintain a wall
between what I don't want in my home but what I will allow in my society. That
impulse is something we need to feed in Islam and could be a progressive force
in China as well. China starts out historically as a wonderfully rich spiritual
country and then Mao [Zedong] hijacks its spiritual heritage. The religious
desire of Chinese is a power that can be co-opted for social good, as it was in
America's "progressive era" at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the
20th. Globalization has a lot that needs to be cleaned up.
If I'm trying - at the same time - to deal with a religious awakening like what
I'm seeing in China and across much of the developing world, because
globalization is integrating a lot of traditional societies into the modern
world, we need to view that less as a danger and more like an opportunity. In
this aspect, post-religious Europe is not the model, we are. In America, we
have successfully integrated numerous nationalities and religions within a
multinational union that is - in many ways - globalization in miniature.
I also believe we have to rethink where we prioritize our partnerships. In my
opinion, China, India and Brazil - in that order - are the top three long-term
allies for the US going forward; they are more important than Europe or Russia,
largely because of demographics. If I have these three nations with me, I have
a quorum of the world's rising powers, and, because we're talking about the
future world they're going to live in, they have a clear stake in making it
happen.
The problem in Europe is aging - consequently they have a very short strategic
time horizon. "Mr & Mrs Chindia" - those countries' new middle class - is
the real system-changer in this century. Speaking as the rest of the world: my
whole life is going to revolve around trying to make them happy. The 21st
century is going to be about making their rise possible and sustainable in an
environmental sense: eg, making them mobile, getting them more plugged into the
grid and shaping their middle-class ideology along the way.
How the middle class was handled in Europe was badly bungled in the early 20th
century, yielding Bolshevism and fascism. If I'm right about global
demographics, if you want to get global pluralism and democracy, people in the
middle class are critical. We managed this process successfully in America, and
we can do this again on a global scale and essentially re-run much of the
American experiment there, yielding a pervasively democratic world across this
century.
Benjamin A Shobert is the managing director of Teleos Inc
(www.teleos-inc.com), a consulting firm dedicated to helping Asian businesses
bring innovative technologies into the North American market.
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