Globalist Thomas P.M. Barnett’s Vision for the Middle East

Thomas Barnett, author of The Pentagon’s New Map, has an op-ed in the Deseret News that dovetails quite well with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s call for America to impose a naval blockade on Iran.

Follow this link to the original source: "Nuclear Iran could provide chance for Mideast stability"

Who is Thomas P.M. Barnett?

As a professor at the U.S. Naval War College, he sees himself as a Jack Ryan, and describes his job as follows: "...the military pays me to sit around and think about the future of the world.... I worry about everything" (The Pentagon's New Map, p. 12).

Professor Barnett is the author of The Pentagon’s New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century (2004) and Blueprint for Action (2005). Barnett's thesis is that the world is divided into two groups: the "Functioning Core," and the "Non-Integrating Gap." What is the difference between the two?

According to an article Barnett wrote for Esquire in March 2003,

Show me where globalization is thick with network connectivity, financial transactions, liberal media flows, and collective security, and I will show you regions featuring stable governments, rising standards of living, and more deaths by suicide than murder. These parts of the world I call the Functioning Core, or Core. But show me where globalization is thinning or just plain absent, and I will show you regions plagued by politically repressive regimes, widespread poverty and disease, routine mass murder, and — most important — the chronic conflicts that incubate the next generation of global terrorists. These parts of the world I call the Non-Integrating Gap, or Gap.

Members of the "Functioning Core" include the United States, European Union, Russia, China, and the Pacific Rim countries, and others that are adapting to "globalization." The "Non-Integrating Gap" is comprised of countries that must be forced militarily to accept globalization and become part of the "Core."

Of course, the first target on the list who needs to be forced into the Core are the Muslim countries. This is precisely why we are in Iraq.

William F. Jasper, Senior Editor for The New American magazine, shed additional light on Barnett's views of who belongs in the "Gap":

The Muslim problem, he says "only accounts for about 40 (max, 50) percent of the Gap’s total population. The rest is largely Christian (Catholics and Protestants, with evangelicals and Mormons gaining fast), whose version of those religions is likewise far more fundamentalist than their counterparts in the Core" (see Barnett's blog entry from September 16, 2004)

I wonder if the editorial staff at the Mormon Church-owned Deseret News, before publishing Barnett's op-ed, knew that the professor views Mormons as part of the "Non-Integrating Gap"?

It's cynical beyond belief that the professor would approach the people who are, in his view, part of the Gap in order to seek support for a military campaign to deal with another Gap member.

Terrorism or any other crisis incident furnishes the transformational opportunities necessary for aggressive internationalists like Barnett to further their agenda. As in the case of Iraq’s non-existent WMDs, by calling Iran’s bid for nuclear energy a “controversial nuclear programme,” Barnett would have the "crisis" he needs as an excuse for advising and promoting U.S.-Israeli intervention. When speaking of the terribly unstable situation in the Middle East and all the players involved he says:

The only way to stabilize such a situation would be to force a trilateral or even regional security scheme that acknowledges each state's nuclear weapons explicitly and links those capabilities to one another through the condition of mutually-assured destruction.

Pursued intelligently by outside great powers, Iran's reach for the bomb could end up being the event that makes real peace in the Middle East truly possible....

When that moment comes, one thing will have to be made crystal clear to Tehran: If Iran attacks Israel with nuclear weapons, the United States would retaliate massively with nuclear weapons, effectively ending Iran's existence as a nation. Absent that firm guarantee, we'd put Israel into the scary situation of worrying about its second-strike capability….

In this journey, offering the right promises to wage unlimited war will get us the best opportunities to forge a permanent peace.

The State Department says Iran is not developing nuclear capabilities; there is no "reach for the bomb" which negates it being the "event that makes real peace" possible. But it is plain to see that Barnett has not abandoned his plan to achieve globalism through regionalism. He has no qualms about urging our nation's leaders to wage "unlimited war" and he is willing to use any manipulated, false scenario to serve as a necessary "crisis."

Which brings us to an announcement by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on Wednesday, May 21. "The present economic sanctions on Iran have exhausted themselves," Olmert has been reported telling Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi on Tuesday, May 20. Rafi Eitan, a member of Olmert’s security cabinet told public radio, "A blockade of maritime and air routes against Iran is a good possibility. There are voices we hear in Washington that indicate the military option remains open."

It seems, therefore, that Israel is pressuring the United Sates to fight its wars. And it probably won’t take much pushing, as the Bush administration and Congress, too, have already demonstrated they are willing players in furthering the regionalism and globalism of Barnett and his internationalist cohorts.

As a blockade is seen internationally as an act of war, this would likely agitate the Iranians into a reactionary escalation, possibly in the Strait of Hormuz. The outcome of such a sequence of events would be dramatic increases in the price of oil, with shortages to boot, creating an economic ripple effect felt across the planet.

Such a destabilizing of the globalized Functioning Core is completely unacceptable in the eyes of our would be global rulers. If such a thing happened, that, of course, would then serve as a pretext for the Core to wage unlimited global warfare to bring all of the Gap peoples out of their "disconnectedness" and into the core.

Those deeply religious Americans, who harbor what Barnett deems as "fundamentalist" religious views, and who want to peacefully live independently from such future global mayhem, might wonder how they suddenly ended up in the crosshairs of the Functioning Core's firepower.

For a look at how the Core nations work together and treat the resisters in the Gap, read here and here.

Before waiting for such a day to arrive, maybe the "Non-Integrated Gap" here in the U.S. should invite the likes of Professor Barnett to go earn a living in the private sector, rather than sitting around worrying about "the future of the world," courtesy of our own tax dollars.

Ann Shibler

JBS