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A salute is due Adm. William Fallon, who tried to prevent a wider war with Iran. After serving one year as commander of U.S. Central Command, Fallon has resigned, saying he was quitting because his differences with official U.S. policy had become a “distraction.” But there is a widespread perception that he was pushed out by the neo-conservatives among President George W. Bush’s aides, especially Vice President Dick Cheney, because of Fallon’s reluctance to go along with the administration’s hawkish moves toward Iran. Cheney, who took five consecutive draft deferments to stay out of the Vietnam war, does not mind...

IT WAS wrenching to listen to President Bush's news conference yesterday. He's struggling to do the right thing. But he's getting terrible advice. He's still counting on a political solution in Iraq. Ain't going to happen. And you can take that to the blood bank. Our famously loyal president has one grave flaw: He's a poor judge of character. He trusts the wrong people. Then he sticks by them. Bush met Russia's Vladimir Putin, "looked into his soul" - and failed to recognize that the guy is an unreformed secret policeman. He stubbornly defends Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the Pentagon's...

Strains grow over strategy to rein in Iran By Daniel Dombeyin London andStephen Fidler in Singapore Published: June 4 2007 03:00 | Last updated: June 4 2007 03:00 The international strategy to deal with Iran's nuclear programme is coming under increasing strain, diplomats and officials acknowledge. Consensus is fraying among the big powers that have fashioned the current policy of imposing limited United Nations sanctions to persuade Tehran to suspend uranium enrichment - which can produce both nuclear fuel and weapons grade material - while offering the prospect of better relations if it complies. The Bush administration is caught between...

Can David Petraeus Rebuild a Nation? Lt. General David Petraeus is set to take over in Iraq. Here, we present an excerpt from Thomas P.M. Barnett's March 2006 profile of Barnett. By Thomas P. M. Barnett The naming of Lieutenant General David Petraeus as the top American ground commander in Iraq marks the arrival of one of the Army’s most daring and original thinkers at the top of U.S. decision making on Iraq. Petraeus has been the subject of two very different articles in Esquire in the last year—the first by contributing writer Thomas P.M. Barnett was part of an...

Thomas Friedman wants the wired world to let in the other half of humanity In working on his third book about global trends, Thomas Friedman discovered that the world has become smaller. In fact, so small it's "flat." A columnist for The New York Times, Mr. Friedman loves to travel our round planet like a photon in a fiber optic cable, picking up this hot new trend and that advice from a notable achiever, then collating it all into a globe- spanning metaphor of mega-meaning. In "The World Is Flat," this modern Magellan even admits, "I'm exhausted just writing about...

Naval War College Professor Thomas Barnett has been one of the leading thinkers behind the Revolution in Military Affairs and the transformation of the Pentagon under Donald Rumsfeld. He is the author of the bestselling book "The Pentagon's New Map," which is a clear exposition of our new post-war political/military environmnet. He has appeared on CSPAN and in many other prominent forums. Of course, Dr. Barnett has attracted some of the hatred directed at Donald Rumsfeld. While some of this is from liberals a lot of the enmity against Rumsfeld derives from Pentagon insiders who cannot figure out that we...

Testimony to the Congressional Overseas Basing Commission Dateline: Office of Force Transformation, Rosslyn VA, 9 November 2004 TESTIMONY SUBMITTED TO THE OVERSEAS BASING COMMISSION BY DR. THOMAS P.M. BARNETT PROFESSOR, NAVAL WAR COLLEGE [9 November 2004] First, let me thank the Commission on Overseas Basing for inviting me to testify here today. Second, let me emphasize right from the start that I'm not an expert per se on the U.S. military's global basing structure. I am essentially a grand strategist who spends his time contemplating the long-term objectives of U.S. foreign policy with a particular focus on how the...

I understand the deal with the devil in Najaf, and I know that temporizing situations can work in our strategic favor. But such deals only work if we spend the meantime creating the connectivity that generates strategic despair on their side, not ours. Strategic despair is when your side surveys the environment and says to itself: “No matter how hard we try, this thing is going south—there’s just too many of them and too few of us.” I worry about strategic despair a lot right now with the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq, and even more so back here at home,...

Thomas P. M. Barnett is a professor of political science at the Naval War College who has spent much of the past 15 years roaming the halls of the Pentagon delivering a Power Point brief (the Pentagon word for briefing) on his strategic view of the world. It is based partly on joint seminars that brought together people from the war college and from Cantor Fitzgerald, the bond trading firm, which lost many of its employees on September 11. Barnett published a version of it as an article in Esquire in 2002, and last month saw the publication of his...

This is a period of hyper-partisanship. It shouldn't be, because it is increasingly clear that just about everyone — Republicans and Democrats, conservatives, liberals and libertarians — misunderstood the developments taking place in the world prior to 9/11. The White House, Congress, the Intelligence Community all scanned the horizon and missed the gathering storm. Or rather they thought it would be nothing more than a passing shower. In March of last year, Thomas P. M. Barnett, a professor of warfare analysis, wrote that until the shock of 9/11, it was almost universally assumed that "only an advanced state can truly...

It hasn't been reviewed by the New York Times or The Post, and it's little known outside the military. But the red-hot book among the nation's admirals and generals this holiday season is a work of strategy by Thomas P.M. Barnett called "The Pentagon's New Map." Imagine a combination of Tom Friedman on globalization and Karl von Clausewitz on war and you begin to get an idea of where Barnett is coming from. His book tries to rethink strategy for a post-Cold War, post-Sept. 11 world caught between order and anarchy, self-satisfaction and rage, prosperity and ruin. Barnett's central...

Orson Scott Card critically reviews 4 very different authors that try to explain our current situation, highlights some of their best points and comes with some very interesting conclusions. Orson's Observation: For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert.Card's Corollary: There is no subject on which anybody knows everything. I recently read a valuable book called Civilization and Its Enemies: The Next Stage of History. The back-flap bio of the author, Lee Harris, talked about how he entered Emory University at age fourteen and graduated summa cum laude. Well, I entered BYU at age sixteen and graduated...

THE PENTAGON’S NEW MAP IT EXPLAINS WHY WE’RE GOING TO WAR, AND WHY WE’LL KEEP GOING TO WAR. BY THOMAS P.M. BARNETT, U.S. NAVAL WAR COLLEGE [MAPS BY WILLIAM MCNULTY] Esquire, March 2003 issue Since the end of the cold war, the United States has been trying to come up with an operating theory of the world—and a military strategy to accompany it. Now there’s a leading contender. It involves identifying the problem parts of the world and aggressively shrinking them. Since September 11, 2001, the author, a professor of warfare analysis, has been advising the Office of the Secretary...

A nice easy read that lays out his plans, vision and competence. I'd even vote for a chapter specifically aimed at democrats asking them to rise above the partisanship displayed on a national level and demonstrate that we are truly one nation, undivided. After watching the media fry Bush all weekend, it occurs to me that he must somehow take his message directly to the people. I would envision sort of a light version of the Contract With America.

CSPAN Tonight SpeechThe Pentagon's New Map National Defense University Fort McNair Washington, District of Columbia (United States) 06/02/2004 Barnett, Thomas P. M., Professor, U.S. Naval War College In a three-hour Power Point presentation Professor Barnett takes a global perspective that integrates political, economic and military elements in a model for the post-September 11 world. He argues that terrorism and globalization have combined to end the great-power model of war that has developed over 400 years, since the Thirty Years War. Instead, he divides the world into an increasingly expanding "Functioning Core" of economically developed, politically stable states integrated into global...