Sounds like the worst nightmares of dependency theorists being written into an explicit doctrine. What it looks like is a plan created by a man who has obdurately refused to learn anything from any experiences we’ve had in the last thirty or forty years.

His bullet point list already starts breaking down on point #2. He goes off characterizing the whole third world where our sweatshop employees, cash crop serfs, and oil imports come from as being absent from international trade? There are very few countries that don’t have some form of economic interdependence going on. North Korea, maybe, but they’re under massive international sanctions anyway.

His ‘Core’ list is a list of our buddies and our handful of rivals too big to really boss around. By the supposed criteria, Iran could very well qualify as a member of the Core. It’s a major oil exporter, has been heavily industrializing and investing in scientific developments, had a GDP nearing $1 trillion a year before our sanctions hit them, and the leadership, say what you will about it, is fairly stable. Are they in his Core? Nope, because there’s no objective criteria for it. It’s an arbitrary line drawn between those we like and those we don’t.

#3 is where it starts turning into a complete joke. This guy can not have paid any attention to anything that’s happened in the Middle East is the last few decades. If he had been, he might have noticed noticed that jihadi violence is more or less the immune system response of the cultures there to any attempts to integrate them into the “Core”.

Not just by us, although we have provoked more than our share of it. The Soviet Union tried lifting Afghanistan out of ‘the Gap’ in the 80s by imposing a socialist state. Disaster for them. Israel tried integrating Lebanon into the Core by intervening to help keep the Maronites in charge. What they got was Hezbollah. The Assads ran a secular state in Syria that protected religious minorities and condemned extremism, that reallt was trying to integrate itself with the Core (just the half of it we don’t like, the Russia and Iran half). Assad is under assault by jihadis from every corner of the Muslim world.

We know where most of the support for international terrorism and jihad comes from: Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, the two big Islamic states that the United States integrated into our Core more than any others. Why do the Sauds and the ISI export it abroad so much? Because it would be blowing back on themselves if they didn’t.

Being integrated into the Core is no guarantee to reduce violence. It is almost certain to guarantee violence and instability when it’s being imposed against the will of the people in that nation. Turkey is an example of a Muslim nation that has integrated well into the international system, but that happened because its people were willing to go through the cultural upheaval that came from it, largely because Ataturk was enough of a hero to them that they’d follow his lead anywhere. Even then, you can still see the strain that comes from it, and the slow backlash now that Ataturk’s no longer around to see them through it, what with Erdogan being elected in landslide votes.

The rest more or less deconstructs itself, I’ll be wasting time by responding to it at length. The groan-inducingly named Leviathan and SysAdmin model is the same one that failed in Vietnam and has done us no better in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet apparently there are still planners out there who can’t grasp that “one group of guys will throw rocks at the hornet’s nest while the other group stands next to it with flyswatters” is a bad strategy, and are somehow still taken seriously.

Chris,

I’d be interested to find out your thoughts on the strategy espoused in the book “The Pentagon’s New Map”. It’s a self described grand strategic vision for America leading the rest of the developed world in integrating problem states into the functioning core of globalized countries that are linked by economic, militarily, cultural flows. I’m not convinced that America should be the world’s policeman, but this is the only coherent strategy for doing so that I’ve heard of.

Wiki’s got the basic ideas and there’s also a longer video of brief the book was based upon:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pentagon%27s_New_Map

Thanks Daniel. All of us, French and American, need to teach our kids about what happened that day, and what continues to happen now (for example, the Nairobi Mall attack).

Mike,

I’m on board with that idea. Especially Afghan women who want a shot at freedom and happiness in life.

Nick,

I agree, if we’re going to do something, do it. If it ain’t worth it, stay the hell out of it. But stop stepping halfway into something, then pulling out after wasting lives and money.