Tom Barnett Interview Part 3

Today, we have part 3 of my interview with Tom Barnett (part 1, part 2). Today Tom drills down on a topic familiar to infosec which is the intersection of connectivity and security, Tom Barnett's  recent book is Great Powers (and you can read it on your Kindle).

GP: Many security writers and thinkers are obsessed with threats, they throw a dart a connected systems, extrapolate worse case scenario and everything goes "boom!"; your work is different, it accounts for system perturbation from threats but has more focus on the system resiliency to deal with events over the long haul. I find this system thinking lacking in many of your peers, and have never understood how worst case threat extrapolation can automatically lead to a parasite that takes over its host. Can you explain why its different to think of security in terms of resiliency rather than simply threats? What insights fall out of this distinction?

Thomas Barnett: Worst-case thinking obviously has its uses in the national security realm.  I just think we got into very odd, extreme tendencies during the Cold War, when the threat of nuclear conflict distorted our thinking unduly.  We’re just beginning to see thinkers and analysts and strategists emerge from a post-Cold War educational environment, like my nephew Brendan who’s studying Russian and International Relations (as I once did) at my alma mater, Wisconsin.  The problem is, the field of international relations, as Brendan will attest, is still obsessed with game theory and all sorts of artificial schools and still tends to be way too insular (economics still needs to embraced far more, not in some antiseptic academic sense but more in a keen understanding of how international business works).  But the key thing is, Brendan and others of his generation won’t be held to the extreme fears that my generation was, despite the constant hyping of the threat of nuclear proliferation, so they’re forced to cast their nets wider and that’s a good thing.

The key thing, in my mind, is acknowledging--in a Robert Wright/non-zero-sum sense—that humanity continues to progress.  The worst-casers tend to view all this rising connectivity as teetering (always!) on the edge of complete collapse, seeing only vulnerabilities and few workarounds.  But to me, the key thing is that more connectivity yields more rules and more rules yield more peace.  Most IR thinkers tend to fret unduly over the fact that politics trails economics and security trails networks.  But these are normal dynamics for a frontier-integrating age.  

Then there's the generational experience explanation:  For many of the teachers I had, they grew up in the shadow of World-War-II-bleeding-into-the-Cold-War, so they were natural—even aggressive—worst casers. But for somebody like me, who comes of age in the early 1970s, it’s hard not to be optimistic, because the global security environment has gotten so much better and the global economy has advanced to a degree that—at least when I was an undergrad in the early 1980s—was inconceivable to the IR field I was trained within.

So I see my role as trying to temper what I consider to be the pointlessly hyperbolic analyses of too many of my elders and simply hold down the fort until my relief arrives in the form of Generation Y thinkers who came of age in an already connected world and thus are able to judge its possibilities and dangers with more equanimity.

Its an interesting image, the younger generation Y being the more rational, reality based looking to how things actually work rather than theories.

Comments

[Adam]

Very interesting! This reminds me a lot of my shift to software-centric threat modeling. What's the DFD of the international system?

(Should we even be nation-state centric?)

[Gunnar]

How about foreign direct investment?

[Kim McDodge]

This is interesting. There has been a phase change in this mental 3,000 year era from the industrial to the medial and Barnett does personify this change. The chemical/industrial is giving away to the media/biological which will redo and lift much of the toxicity that the industrial phase has wrought, just out of basic biological survival instinct. What fun to be a part of that!

As for being nation state centric, Adam, again, an industrial concept with its ideologistics, this may give way to noetic understanding and change to display of attachment to place among places, being biologically sane on a much more aware level than ever.