A Postmodern Orthodoxy

Or, a more specific way to describe where we’re going with this: this is how our energy policy in the immediate future can impact our national security in the distant future: i.e., environmentalism may be more important we typically think it is, but for reasons that we don’t typically associate with it.

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Back in 2004, the military geostrategist Thomas P. M. Barnett published The Pentagon’s New Map, a book about (among other things) America’s place in the world after the Cold War, and how globalization relates to issues of national security. This wasn’t Barnett’s first book, but it’s was the first one to present his overarching view of American foreign policy, and (as far as I can tell) is the first one that made Barnett a household name . . . at least at the Pentagon.  Since then, Barnett has written a few more books – Blueprint for Action, a sequel to Pentagon’s New Map, and Great Powers: America and the World After Bush, which came out in 2009.

Quite a bit of what makes The Pentagon’s New Map such a fascinating read is that it does a terrific job of making sense of American foreign policy throughout the course of the Cold War. By “make sense,” I don’t mean that Barnett explains that why U.S. foreign policy was right all the time – I mean that Barnett explains the motivations behind the foreign policy of the United States, primarily from the perspective of the military. This is not an apologetic for American foreign policy, but Barnett is (rightly, in my opinion) far more interested in answering the questions of why the United States has done what it has done, rather than just playing hypothetical “what if” sort of games. Foreign policy decisions, like just about any decision made in a complex environment with incomplete information, can really only be shown to be good or bad after a substantial amount of time has passed. In retrospect, some decisions that seemed wise at the time can seem to be pure lunacy (and vice versa), and the problem is nearly always compounded if the decision is interpreted by someone that does not share the assumptions of the individual that made the decision in the first place.

All that to say: to explain the foreign policy of the United States in a way that shows it to have been right – or even particularly coherent – may well nigh be impossible. That isn’t what Barnett is trying to do, in any case: he’s far more interested in telling us why it happened, what we can learn from this, and what our foreign policy should be going forward now that the Cold War is over.

To see where Barnett’s going with this, let’s back up and look at foreign policy throughout the Cold War, and contrast this with current U.S. foreign policy, and try and draw some lessons. Be warned, though, this is a summary of a 400-page book in just a few paragraphs, so this may be something of a rocky road, and your best bet is to go read Barnett’s book(s). In any case, here we go:

The overarching strategy of the United States during the Cold War was containment – the idea that the spread of communism could be slowed, and eventually stopped, by increasing American influence abroad. The most visible effect of this that everyone remembers from this, of course, is the Vietnam War, but to see containment as a philosophy that impacted only American military decisions is to underestimate how far-reaching this way of thinking actually was. The majority of the foreign policy decisions – why the U.S. supported rebels in a particular country but the government in some other country, where foreign aid went, what wars were deemed appropriate to send the U.S. military into, and who was the beneficiary of American military technology – make much more sense when looked at through the lens of containment of communism. (Interestingly – and just as an aside – before the fall of the Soviet Union, no one in the Pentagon seemed to think that Islamic terrorism was going to be much of a problem when compared to the threat of communism, which is probably why the United States supported Islamic rebels in Afghanistan when they were fighting the Soviets.)

When looking back on the Cold War, however, some commentators have raised doubts raised as to whether or not containment was the best way to win the Cold War, or even if any over-arching strategy was necessary at all. The fears articulated in the domino theory – the bogeyman of U.S. military planners at the time – didn’t materialize after the U.S withdrew from Vietnam (or at any other time, really). Consequently, it’s fun to speculate that the U.S. may have won the Cold War without having to ever get involved in Vietnam, for example. Looking back on the Cold War, it seems that containment may have been less necessary than anyone thought at the time, given that communism was going to collapse anyway.

As interesting as this sort of speculation is, though, it’s ultimately not that helpful: containment may have been executed badly, or it might have been a bad plan to being with, but it was the philosophy behind U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War, which, let’s not forget, the U.S. won. Say what you want about containment, but on a very basic and very important level, it worked.

After the collapse of communism, though, the idea of containment doesn’t really lend itself well to any sort of follow-up plan. Consequently, there hasn’t been – at least from the perspective of the Pentagon – any sort of coherent long-term strategy now that the Cold War has ended, even though the sheer number of military operations that the U.S. has been involved in since then has been nothing short of astounding.

To a certain extent, this is completely understandable and expected, as after the fall of the Soviet Union, there was no clear enemy that could conceivably stand up to the U.S. military. Since 2001, however, this hasn’t been a problem. Still, the Pentagon is still interested in buying F-22 Raptors, maintaining nuclear submarines, or (up until recently) a ballistic missile defense shield. It’s difficult to see how any of those have any immediate impact to the wars that the U.S. has been involved with since 2001, which suggests that there’s more than a little bit of people at the Pentagon that are still thinking in terms of the Cold War (i.e., what big wars that the U.S. may have to fight in the future) and not in terms of what we know that the U.S. military is actually going to have to do now.

Barnett makes a good case that this way of thinking is probably not that productive, and a new global strategy – occupying a similar role as containment did during the Cold War – needs to be figured out. (Containment, it’s worth pointing out, doesn’t really make all that much sense in the current geopolitical climate – the terrorism that the U.S. would be trying to contain doesn’t typically have the goal of taking over an entire country, and as the events of the last decade have proved repeatedly, it doesn’t take that many people crossing the borders and setting off bombs to terrorize the entire world.)

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, however, the U.S. has the only military that is designed to project power to any region of the world – something that Americans take for granted, but which is unusual enough that it’s worth pondering for a minute, here: any other country’s military is designed to either (a) defend the country where the military is based, or (b) deliver a bomb to somewhere else – presumably somewhere that the country doesn’t like very much. That’s really about all anyone other than the U.S. can do. No other country has military bases scattered over the whole globe, the ability to invade a country that’s half way around the world, or to put a Navy task force (with, at its center, a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier) off just about anyone’s coast in order to make them behave. It’s also not much of an exaggeration to say that the U.S. Navy is the only blue water navy left in the world.

Barnett concludes that this means that the most important export of the United States is, of all things, security. There’s no other country that has the ability to project power to any given region of the globe, and with this level of power – at least, according to Barnett – comes a certain degree of responsibility that the U.S. did not have before the Soviet Union fell.

If we’re trying to figure out where we’re likely going to have to send the military at some point in the future, it’s worth asking where has the U.S. military been exercising this responsibility since the end of the Cold War. Barnett has drawn a map of the places in which the U.S. military has been involved since the end of the Cold War – peacekeeping operations, combat, evacuation, security, or even just a show of force – and it becomes obvious that there are regions of the world that need attention, repeatedly, and other regions which don’t need any attention at all. Barnett terms these two regions the “Functioning Core” and the “Non-Integrating Gap,” and to a certain extent, this is just a concise way of saying “countries that have bought into globalization” and “countries that have not bought into globalization.”

This isn’t necessarily a one-to-one correspondence, here: not every country that hasn’t bought into globalization has necessarily had a U.S. military presence; the vast majority of those countries have not. Still, it’s almost a sure bet that any country that has bought into globalization hasn’t had to have the U.S. military come in and set up shop.

Looking at the way this has worked with India and Pakistan provides a helpful example that should make things more clear: India, by and large, has bought into globalization, whereas Pakistan, by and large, has not. The last time that India and Pakistan decided to start getting all excited about who, exactly, was in control of Kashmir, India was provided with a strong incentive to knock it off because investors generally do not like to be conducting business in a country that is talking about dropping nuclear bombs on its neighbor – especially if the neighbor has nuclear bombs, as well. Quite a few of the investors packed up and left, the Indian economy started to take a hit, and everyone (particularly the Indians) toned down the rhetoric pretty quickly. (Once all the investors realized that the nuclear weapons would all stay in their silos, most of them came back.)

The point, here, isn’t that countries with nothing to lose can blackmail their richer neighbors (although that’s may be worth investigating, too), but that India has a huge motivation to conduct itself in a way that will make the country a good place to conduct business – which, most of the time, is pretty similar to saying that India is going to be a pretty good place to live, too.

As Thomas Friedman has noted elsewhere, there haven’t been any wars fought between countries that both have McDonald’s. It’s obvious that this isn’t because of any peacekeeping skills that Ronald McDonald has, but because countries that are plugged into the globalized economy enough to have a McDonald’s are unlikely to want to fight any other countries that are plugged into the same globalized economy. If a country is plugged into globalization enough to have a McDonald’s, its economy is dependent on foreign investment, and nothing scares foreign investors like a war.

Globalization may be a temporarily stabilizing influence, but this isn’t to say that it has, in all circumstances, always been a good thing. The movement has its cheerleaders (Thomas Friedman, for example, in The World is Flat) and its thoughtful critics (Joseph Stiglitz, in Globalization and its Discontents, among other books). Still, the vast majority of commentators seem to agree that although globalization has been a good thing overall, it could certainly have been managed in a way that would be more equitable to a larger number of people in poorer countries. Perhaps the most resounding endorsement of globalization is this: even among those that are its harshest critics, no one has yet come up with a credible plan that could move more people out of poverty more quickly than globalization – or at least something like it – has done. As many legitimate complaints about globalization as there are, it’s still clear that the world is in better shape than it would be if globalization wasn’t there at all.

What’s less obvious, though, is that globalization doesn’t work only because it forces people to be responsible by pulling them out of poverty so that they have something to lose. If that was true, then we’d have nothing to fear from rich dictators. Clearly this isn’t the case.

This point is actually made more clearly in Fareed Zakaria’s The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad, in which he discusses (among other things) the relationship between democracy and liberalism. (Zakaria is using liberalism in the classic sense of the word that denotes an emphasis on individual freedom, rule of law, and respect for other points of view, not in the sense that most Americans now use the word when they refer to the left side of the American political spectrum.) Americans have a tendency to think that these two ideas go hand-in-hand, because that’s how it’s happened here. This hasn’t been true everywhere that democracy has developed, though – without a concept of liberalism, democracy can descend into what Alexis de Tocqueville called the “tyranny of the majority,” and although the result may be democratic, it’s not a liberal democracy, and therein lies the problem.

To quote an few examples from Zakaria – take Iran, a country that’s still in what Barnett would consider the Non-Integrating Gap. Iran is both (fairly) stable and (somewhat of) a democracy, at least in the sense that its leaders can be replaced on a regular basis, but hasn’t bought into globalization for two closely related reasons: (a) a theocratic government, and (b) a desire to be separated from the globalized (or, as it’s commonly called now, the “western”) world. In the view of at least the leaders in Iran, the risk of corrupting Islam isn’t worth any of the benefits of globalization that might bring. Consequently, even though you’ve got what’s technically a democracy in Iran, you’ve got a regime in power that doesn’t do so well respecting the individual rights of its citizens, as recent events have shown.

Saudi Arabia, like Iran, doesn’t have a tradition of liberalism, but unlike Iran, the Saudis do not even have the pretense of a democracy. The massive oil revenues that fund the country (and the lifestyle of the royal family) have kept the government from having to depend on its citizenry in any significant way. How the country spends its money, though, is what’s telling: Saudi Arabia has become notorious for funding schools that teach Islamic fundamentalism.

The point of all this is that it takes more than just democracy to buy into globalization, and it takes more than large infusions of cash to keep a country from trying to spread Islamic fundamentalism. Consequently, neither Iran and Saudi Arabia have bought into globalization, as Zakaria would put it – or, as Barnett would say, they’re both still outside the Functioning Core.

In any case, it’s pretty clear that a country or citizenry’s ability just to make a bunch of money doesn’t mean that their country has bought into globalization, or democracy, or liberal democracy. The countries in the industrialized west – that most everyone else, now, is imitating, at least to a certain extent – benefit from globalization, in Zakaria’s view, because they’ve embraced an economic condition (free trade), a set of values (liberalism), and a form of government (democracy).

In Barnett’s view, the point of U.S. foreign policy – at least militarily – is to drain what he terms the “swamps” where terrorism, right now, thrives. All the countries that are security concerns for the U.S. are countries that have not bought into globalization, and Barnett demonstrates this by showing where the U.S. military has been deployed since the end of the Cold War. Note that this isn’t a one-to-one correspondence, however. If a given country hasn’t bought into globalization, this doesn’t mean that we’re necessarily guaranteed to have the U.S. military show up, but what Barnett is saying is that if a country gets plugged into the global economy, we’re a lot more likely to have neighbors like India and China than we are Pakistan and North Korea.

This is, it’s worth noting, what the Bush administration was attempting to accomplish in Iraq, albeit in what now seems like an incredibly clumsy and counterproductive way. The idea behind the entire operation was that the Iraq that resulted would (eventually) be both a liberal democracy that would be plugged into the global grid and would be a stabilizing influence in the Middle East. This didn’t work for many reasons, but one of them is something that has been a consistent error in American foreign policy for awhile, and that is the assumption that the establishment of a democracy would bring free trade and liberal values into the country when in fact, as Zakaria points out, it seems to work far more productively when it’s done the other way around.

Barnett concludes that the military strategy of the U.S. should follow what our economic strategy (frequently articulated as much by American or international corporations as much as by the Federal government) has been for the last decade: bring as many countries as possible into globalization. As much as If there are no “swamps,” as Barnett puts it, where terrorism will be able to thrive, then the United States is going to be more secure. This is, on some level, the only way to get America to be secure at all, short of closing all the borders and living in a police state.

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The problem, though, is that free trade is a huge part of globalization, and trade on any sort of scale or over any sort of distance depends on oil prices staying relatively cheap. This is something that’s unlikely to be true for very much longer.

Demand for oil has nowhere to go but up: world population is still going up, and the globalization that Barnett extols as being good for our national security has resulted in substantial numbers of people being pulled out of poverty in the countries that have embraced globalization. The most notable examples at this point are India and China. While just about everyone would agree that pulling large numbers of Indians and Chinese (and anyone else) up from below the poverty line is a good thing, it’s also worth noting that once those same people get pulled up to the middle class, they’re going to burn a lot more oil than they did before, and consequently the demand is going to jump significantly.

How significantly? The middle class that is developing just in India is larger than the population of the entire United States, and most people in that middle class are intensely interested in buying cars. Tata has developed a car – the Nano – that retails for around $2,000, and thanks to the increased prosperity brought about by globalization, this is something that, over the next few years, millions of Indians will now be able to afford for the first time.

This isn’t just an isolated event in India (and China, where the number of cars is increasing dramatically, as well). With our current energy technology and infrastructure, odds are pretty good that wherever a standard of living increases, it increases because someone is consuming more energy – and frequently this means burning more oil. However, it’s worth noting that this isn’t true all the time: China’s increased power demands are being met because they’re building lots of coal-burning power plants. Farmers living on the edge of the rain forest in South America slashing-and-burning their way to more firewood and farmland, neither of which involve oil prices, at least directly. Still, oil (or some derivative of it) seems to be what’s most in demand when it comes to just about any sort of transportation, and, unfortunately, burning oil is probably the most environmentally friendly option of what’s listed here – illustrating the difficulties encountered when trying to fight poverty and climate change at the same time.

All that to say – even if oil production was a constant, the increased demand of millions of new cars on the road is going to drive prices up, as will the increased amount of trade that made all this wealth possible in the first place. Clearly demand is going up, but odds are good that oil production isn’t going to be able to increase to meet demand. It’s probably not going to even be able to stay constant, either.

There’s no shortage of books being published now on the concept of peak oil, from Jeff Rubin’s somewhat panicky Why Your World is About To Get A Whole Lot Smaller to Christopher Steiner’s myopically optimistic and overly predictive $20 Per Gallon. The most carefully researched and most balanced book that I’ve run across so far, however, has been Paul Roberts’s The End of Oil, which is unfortunately now a couple years out of date, but still well worth a read.

There are enough unknowns in predicting peak oil that while there may be widespread disagreement about how far into the future oil production is actually going to peak, or even if we’ve already passed the peak already. Just about everyone that’s looked at the problem agrees that it’s probably going to happen before too long. Right now, for every six barrels of oil that we consume, oil companies find . . . one. Clearly this isn’t sustainable. The question, at this point, isn’t so much if oil production is going to start dropping off, but when.

On the other hand, the gradual decline of oil production doesn’t mean that oil is just going to go away overnight. As the price of oil continues to go up, oil fields that are difficult to access – and therefore, not worth exploiting now – will probably become economically viable at some point in the future. This means although we’re not going to run out, we’ve already run out of oil that’s easy to get to. What we’ve got left is oil that’s at the bottom of the ocean somewhere, or oil that has to be extracted from tar-like sands in Canada. This sort of oil – which increasingly, is the only sort of oil that’s left – costs more because it’s harder to get to than big gushers in the middle of Texas. Even if demand somehow diminishes, the increasing price of finding, extracting, and refining oil means that the price will not be able to fall all that much.

There are obvious ways in which the increasing price of oil is going to change society – the most visible of which is what has happened to SUV sales (and American automakers) when gas prices began to climb. We can expect the trend to smaller and more fuel-efficient cars to continue, and the increasing price of gas is likely to be far more effective in regulating gas use than the government’s CAFE standards have been in the past.

Quite a bit of the changes that will result, though, are going to seem more interesting and unpredictable to live through, due to the fact that our society runs on cheap oil in ways that most of us don’t usually think about. Right now, for example, the trade that has enabled Americans to buy massive amounts of inexpensively made plastic products from China (and, incidentally, improved the living conditions of lots of Chinese) runs on cheap oil, both for the manufacturing of plastic products and the transportation costs involved in moving a container ship across the Pacific Ocean. At some point, the cost of transporting all this stuff is going to be more than the difference between U.S. and Chinese labor – at which point, it’s going to become more less expensive than the cost of just making it furniture, for example, back in the United States.

A similar situation will eventually come about with the food supply – right now, the fertilizers that grow most of America’s food supply are made mostly from petroleum products: right now, organically grown food is substantially more expensive than non-organically grown food, but the gap will likely narrow in the future: as petroleum-based products increase in price, the cost of the fertilizers for organic food is going to increase, while it seems that organic fertilizers – mostly products like cow manure – are unlikely to experience a similar drop in supply. (Similarly, locally grown food will become more economical, as the costs of transporting food rise with gas prices.)

All that to say: if we’re just looking at the experience of people in America, the end result of these changes won’t necessarily be all bad, although the process of going through it may be, to a certain extent, traumatic. As with any shift in society, the individuals and businesses that have anticipated the change will likely do well, while those that haven’t will likely have to change or face severe problems. For example, Wal-Mart – or any business that is based on transporting goods over long distances – is likely to become less economically viable unless their business model changes. Likewise, any housing developments that have been beyond the bleeding edge of urban sprawl are likely to be beyond the range of the public transit that will likely be in demand when gas prices climb, and those property values will likely take a hit.

Still, eating locally grown food and buying furniture from craftsmen that live down the road doesn’t seem like a bad change at all. As someone has pointed out, the changes that more expensive oil prices will force Americans to make will force the average American city to make changes so that it resembles Paris more than Houston. Again, that’s not all bad: given those two choices, most of us would much rather vacation in Paris.

The problem – at least as it relates to issues of national security – arises when we start looking at the effect of the increasing price of oil on the rest of the world, not just America. Undoubtedly, this is going to cause more problems in countries that are still getting than it is going to cause here. (Or, at least, America will be better equipped to absorb the shock.) Most of us have the option to buy smaller, more fuel-efficient cars (or just driving less in our current cars) if the price of gasoline doubles, but for people in developing countries that are buying cars for the first time, the price of gasoline doubling may make automobile ownership something that’s beyond the range of what’s feasible for them to afford in the first place.

Just in general, getting countries connected to the rest of the world using globalization (via the process of free trade) is something that’s going to continue to be more difficult as the price of oil goes up. Globalization, at this point, may actually be something a race: countries that aren’t able to get connected before the price of oil takes a more dramatic turn upward will have a much more difficult process getting connected at all. Consequently, the price of gas going up will likely make it quite a bit more difficult to drain the swamps, to use Barnett’s terminology, that are now sheltering terrorism. We had best drain them quickly, while it is still possible to do so.

There is not, at this point, an obvious and easy solution to this problem as far as I can tell. In addition, any proposals towards solving this problem will vary wildly depending on the assumptions of whoever is doing the proposing: how much government intervention one feels is necessary to solve problems as opposed to faith in the free market to work issues out on their own, for example; or how much priority one believes efforts to combat climate change should be given.

However, reserving judgment on those issues as much as is possible, I offer a couple suggestions of varying feasibility below. You are welcome to offer your own, as well.

America needs to plan for the coming oil price increases by reducing our oil consumption – or, at the very least, putting in the infrastructure that we’ll need after oil prices rise – so the increase in oil prices resemble a gentle slope upwards that can be easily climbed, and not a brick wall that can’t. Quite a bit of this preparation will likely be done with help from Adam Smith’s invisible hand, so government-mandated preparation for this may be, in some instances, largely unnecessary. For example, it’s worth noting that hardly anyone was interested in debating the government’s CAFE standards when was $4 per gallon. At that point, the Americans that were looking for new cars already had significant motivation to look for something that got good gas mileage, without any encouragement from Washington. (This isn’t to say that the CAFE standards can’t be helpful, on some level: if the government had actually enforced the current CAFE standards, instead of letting lobbyists from Detroit categorize SUVs as “light trucks,” it’s likely that U.S. automakers wouldn’t have been so myopically focused on larger cars – in which case, automakers in Detroit may not have needed government assistance to stay afloat.)

In preparing for other issues, though, Smith’s invisible hand may be likely to give us all the finger, and some preparation may be warranted: for example, right now, Americans are driving less each year as gas prices continue to rise. Under these circumstances, the continued construction of new roads may not a great deal of sense – the tax dollars that are funding new road construction now may be better served putting in public transit, high-speed rail systems, or other ways of transportation that will undoubtedly more in demand when gas is more expensive.

As the bumper sticker says, renewable energy is national security. While that may a bit of an oversimplification, the point is still essentially sound. At some point in the future, it’s likely that the people that are interested in saving the polar bears and the people that are interested in national security will probably find themselves, increasingly, on the same side of the debates – assuming, of course, that both sides take a significantly long-term view of things.

2. Green technologies need to be made economically viable, and they need to be made economically viable for developing countries. This seems a tall order when, right now, they’re not economically viable here, but green technologies are likely not going to be deployed in any sort of widespread way until they’re economically viable. Very few governments are going to potentially cripple the industries in their country by demanding that they use energy sources that are more expensive, when other governments have not done the same to their industries; and green technology adopted only because of government subsidies typically only lasts as long as the government subsidy.

Still, deploying new technology in countries that don’t have our current level of technology may actually be easier than deploying it here. Countries in Africa, for instance, have been able to go straight from having no telephones to cell phones – they were able to skip the step of having land lines all over the place, which meant that getting everyone to adapt to the higher level of technology was easier because there was no other practical alternative.

The overall point, though, is that once green technology becomes economically viable, there will be a way to (a) protect countries that have just started globalization from having their efforts collapse due to the increasing price of oil, and (b) once again, we’ll be in a position where we can connect previously non-integrating countries to the rest of the world.

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Countries that – for whatever reason – can’t get connected to to the rest of the world are unlikely to be able to improve their standard of living on their own – at least in comparison to what might have been. As many problems as globalization has caused, it’s probably still the best bet to pull people out of poverty, give them a representative government, and make our country more secure at the same time.

We’ve just got to figure out to continue the process when the price of oil goes up. If we can’t, things are sure going to get interesting . . .

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 3rd, 2010 at 11:49 pm and is filed under Worldview::Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.