The Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century Book

The Pentagon's New Map strives to be a practical "strategy for a Second American Century". In this bold and brilliantly argued work, Thomas Barnett calls globalisation "this country's gift to history" and explains why its wide dissemination is critical to the security of not only America but the entire world. As a senior military analyst for the US Naval War College, Barnett is intimately familiar with the culture of the Pentagon and the State Department (both of which he believes are due for significant overhauls). He explains how the Pentagon spent the 1990s grasping for a long-term strategy to replace containment. The 9/11 terrorist attacks, Barnett argues, revealed the gap between an outdated Cold War-era military and a radically different one needed to deal with emerging threats. He believes that America is the prime mover in developing a "future worth creating" not because of its unrivalled capacity to wage war, but because of its ability to ensure security around the world. Furthermore, he believes that the US has a moral responsibility to create a better world and the way he proposes to do that is by bringing all nations into the fold of globalisation, or what he calls connectedness. Eradicating disconnectedness, therefore, is "the defining security task of our age". His stunning predictions of a US annexation of much of Latin America and Canada within 50 years as well as an end to war in the foreseeable future guarantee that the book will be controversial. And that's good. The Pentagon's New Map deserves to be widely discussed. Ultimately, however, the most impressive aspects of the book are not its revolutionary ideas but its overwhelming optimism. Barnett wants the US to pursue the dream of global peace with the same zeal that was applied to preventing global nuclear war with the former Soviet Union. High-level civilian policy makers and top military leaders are already familiar with his vision of the future--this book is a briefing for the rest of us and it cannot be ignored. --Shawn Carkonen, Amazon.comRead More