Words matter. These are the best Thomas P.M. Barnett Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Wikistrat is my ninth start-up, so I’ve been through this process a few times. You have to go with what works. The power of example is compelling, so model the ideas that you want someone to understand.
Once Europe’s colonial empires were sent into deep decline, thanks to World War II, America became globalization’s primary replicating force, integrating Asia into its low-end production networks across the second half of the twentieth century – just like Europe had integrated the U.S. before.
Washington has a tendency to hold other powers to standards that it routinely flaunts – plain and simple.
Some Western demographers have posited, due to the female shortage created by the one-child policy, that China will be forced to field a vast force – as in tens of millions strong – of wifeless men who’ll gladly wage wars around the planet to burn off all those unrequited hormones.
Great powers reserve the right to police bad actors in their neighborhoods.
During the cold war, it was easy for the Pentagon to justify its budget, as the Soviets essentially sized our forces for us. We simply counted up their stuff and either bought more of the same or upgraded our technology.
The Department of Homeland Security is a strategic feel good measure. It’s going to be the Department of Agriculture for the 21st century. TSA – thousands standing around.
Women waited 144 years before earning suffrage. If a mature, multiparty democracy was so darn easy, everybody would have one.
If you can get out in front of people with your ideas and your execution, you’ll attract the people who need to be pulled in.
Run with what works: Sell to the people who believe in you and are willing to take the chances and make the experience happen.
The Marines are like my West Highland Terrier. They get up every morning, they want to dig a hole, and they want to kill something.
I have long argued that, if China and the United States were interested in pursuing a strategic partnership, Africa is the best place to start, as neither enters the situation with past colonial baggage, and both possess interests that are quite complementary.
America has remained highly engaged in global affairs throughout decades of growing energy dependency, so it’s hard to imagine it would disengage if its quest for energy self-sufficiency failed – especially amidst a world of heightened resource competition.
The Air Force has it far worse than the Navy in terms of existential fears, primarily due to the rapid rise and unbelievable dissemination of drones, where seemingly now every military unit has their own miniature air wing of what would have recently passed as toys.
In the end, for all of Obama’s grand rhetoric on ridding the world of nuclear weapons, history has doomed him to preside over the emergence of two rogue nuclear regimes (North Korea and Iran).
Every U.S. president enters office promising stronger ties with our southern neighbors, only to thereupon largely ignore them.
So long as the global economy continues to recover, that remains Obama’s No. 1 claim to successful leadership. Nothing else even comes close.
An Obama administration truly looking to break with the molds of the past would stop treating Africa as an obligation and start treating it as globalization’s next great opportunity, understanding that Chinese – along with Indians and Arab sovereign wealth funds – are natural partners in this process.
Crafty politician that he is, Obama was smart enough to set low enough standards for his administration to claim ‘victory’ by the summer of 2011 or so.
If America is addicted to foreign money and foreign oil, then China is addicted to foreign supplies of just about every commodity known to man – save highly polluting coal.
Homeland defense doesn’t generate any force requirements beyond having enough National Guard to save lives in natural disasters and to baby-sit nuclear power plants on Code Red days.
The most important thing you need to know about the Pentagon is that it is not in charge of today’s wars but rather tomorrow’s wars.
