Barnett's new release: "Great Powers"

Tom Barnett has a new book out, "Great Powers: America and the World After Bush." He's been giving interviews and writing articles lately to lay the groundwork for its release, and if the thinking in them is any indication, his book should turn out to be a must-read.

From this month's Esquire:

But here's the tough compromise that may hold up this much-needed expansion: The EU seems determined to get some sort of global securities-and-exchange commission to regulate intermarket financial flows in the future — in effect, viewing the current global crash as Washington once did Wall Street's 1929 collapse. As far as emerging markets are concerned, that's going to feel suspiciously constraining; having just achieved some wealth, the rising East and South now face the West's desire to regulate crucial investment flows so as to smooth out an inevitable global business cycle. Which is like wanting to go all the way on the first date — that trust simply does not yet exist in the system.

...

If Ahmadinejad is toppled by either the moderate former president Mohammad Khatami or the technocratic Tehran mayor, Mohammad Qalibaf, then Iran is definitely back in play, giving Obama plenty more wiggle room elsewhere, but only if he and Hillary Clinton can keep a lid on Israel's hard-line factions, which seem intent on taking out Iran's nuclear facilities preemptively. (Such strikes won't succeed, but they would trigger Iran's hard-line retrenchment, no matter which candidate prevails.) To that end, when the Obama camp coolly floats the notion of extending America's nuclear umbrella over Israel and — implicitly — any friendly neighboring Arab state that desires it, the former junior senator from Illinois is breaking out the big-boy voice of the world's sole military superpower.

Also today, via SWJ, Ten Questions with Thomas P.M. Barnett:

I want to make clear to the reader that this globalization is of our making—the result of a conscious grand strategy that I can trace back to at least Teddy Roosevelt’s dream of making the world more hospitable to America’s need to simply be all that it can be. That somewhat undifferentiated vision got sharper with Wilson, after WWI. The vision became reality with FDR, after WWII, when he set in motion the international liberal trade order that begets the West and, in turn, the globalization we enjoy today. That model of states uniting and economies integrating and defense shifting to security and a uniquely competitive religious landscape was built here—first—in these United States, the planet’s original multinational political and economic and security union. With Deng’s decision to marketize China, creating a critical mass for globalization in the early 1980s, we’ve since seen that model spread like wildfire around the planet, reformatting traditional societies in a dynamic right out of Marx’s Das Kapital. In short, our revolutionary vision for ourselves has now become our intentional revolutionary vision for the planet. This made-in-America, globalization—love it but you can’t leave it—now encompasses everybody save the “bottom billion.”