Rounding out the Globalist Vision

Your analysis is very lucid about the security dimension, about the interface between security and globalization. Where your analysis may not go is with the political overlay, because what is interesting about the Iraq experience, in addition to the failure of combining these two forms of military in an effective way, is the failure to handle the politics as we go forward. What are your thoughts about that? You seem to be saying that the security will speak for itself, globalization will speak for itself; but do they translate into the politics?

Well, that's a challenge. The first book was all about explaining the security. The second book, I've discovered as I've written it, is about extending the argument into the economic [realm], and subsequent books will get into the politics of it. I see it in that layering effect, and I'm very much from my sort of Marxian roots. I believe that economics determines politics, that good markets demand and create and engender good political systems. So, good markets, good governments.

But to get a good market, I have learned through the course of my career, the prerequisite is baseline security. Unless you can have credit and trust and the notion that you can sink investments that may take decades to amortize and reap benefits, you don't have markets. If you don't have markets, you're unlikely to get a middle class or democracy. So, I see it as a sequencing and a layering. This is an effort to build that entire package.

The failure or the limitation of the book is that it starts the argument from the Pentagon and goes outward, but it's my belief that if you get the U.S. military right on this subject, you have the chance to turn history, because there is nobody who can make that kind of effort like the United States.

Once it starts, it overwhelmingly becomes a private sector affair. It's driven by economics, and that's where everybody gets involved, even as much or more so than us, the Japanese with all their stuff, the Chinese, the Indians, the Russians with their energy, the Europeans with everything they bring to the table, the Brazilians as an agricultural superpower. It gets so much bigger than us, but we are a linchpin because of this accident or the course of history that leaves us at the end of the Cold War as the last standing military superpower, and a country rich enough to be able to expend that effort -- and, I would argue, kind enough and generous enough and idealistic enough to make that effort on behalf of others.

We haven't fought a war, really, on behalf of ourselves since the Second World War. We've been fighting wars on behalf of others, and ideas, and visions of a better tomorrow, which I think represents us very faithfully as a very optimistic, generous, and kind society.

Do you think that globalization will discipline us to get our house in order, in order to be able to do this? Because implicit in what you're suggesting for our role is responsibility, accountability, and so on; and the debt that we're running up suggests that we're going to be more dependent on others, including the Chinese.

There's a transaction there. What I think we've learned in terms of why we haven't seen a great power rise up since the end of the Cold War is that in effect they've outsourced the function to us. They've made us the leviathan -- "they," the rest of the world -- by buying our debt, which is driven to a certain extent but not nearly enough by the defense budget. There's a lot of personal and private spendthriftiness in that, as well, in terms of the way we've racked up a lot of private sector debt. But there is a natural transaction there. They are concentrating in the rest of the world, especially in developing Asia, on economics, and they're allowing us to be the big security player in the system. So, they're buying our debt and paying for that provision of security.

Now, the discipline they offer to us is twofold. One, they can discipline us in terms of our spendful ways by forcing the decline of our dollar over time, by creating other reserve currencies like the Euro, and ultimately we're going to see one based in Asia on convertible yuan and yen in Japan. It's natural, it's got to happen.

So, they'll discipline us economically, but even more important, they'll discipline us militarily and politically, because they can make clear to us in many ways that if they don't see a future worth creating in the employment of our military power abroad, if we don't contextualize it sufficiently within some larger vision of a better world, and bring them along in the process, and make clear what our goals are, and our rule sets, and bring them into the enunciation of the rule sets, and that entire process, then they can stop buying our debt, and on that basis make it economically difficult for us to maintain that force and field it.

I think that's a great thing. That's what keeps us from going over the edge and becoming what a lot of overwrought and slightly hyperbolic foreign policy experts have dubbed the American Empire, which I think is nonsense. Globalization comes with rules, not a ruler.

Next page: Conclusion