This is a simple article on the US foreign policy in The Age by Gwynne Dyer. It is unusual in that it refers to the geopolitics of war. I want to connect the article to a book review of Thomas P. M. Barnett's The Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century. Barnett calls into question Dwyer's idea of the US as a rogue superpower.

My reason for spending time on this is twofold. Foreign policy discourse at a geopolitical level (as distinct from the party politicallevel) is very weak in Australia. Secondly, citzenship within the nation-state is increasingly being influenced by global security concerns.

Dyer's account is about a neo-liberal discourse. She says:

"The war in Iraq is not really very important, because Iraq itself is not all that important in the global scheme of things...What matters is the way that this war is shaping America's relations with the rest of the world, and in that sense Iraq has the potential to be a far bigger turning point than Vietnam ever could have been."

But what was that? Some new kind of governance.

Dwyer does not explore such issues. She limits herself to spelling out the conflicting relationships arising from the Iraqi war:

"Two popular perceptions of what is happening dominate the world at the moment. One, held mainly by Americans, sees a world beleaguered by such a huge terrorist threat that all the old rules have to be abandoned. The United States, they believe, is carrying the main burden of this 'war against terror' while other countries shirk their share of the load.

Most of the other great powers are coming to see the United States as a rogue superpower. Most people in other countries, and most of their governments, too, see terrorism as a much smaller threat. Certain measures need to be taken to contain it, but it is nowhere near big enough to justify scrapping all the rules of international behaviour we have painfully built up over the past half-century."

"A lot of the governments also believe (in private) that the Bush Administration is deliberately pumping up the fear of terrorism to justify a unilateral strategy that really aims at establishing American hegemony worldwide. The popular American belief that the United States has the right to go anywhere and attack anybody if it feels itself threatened ...has been greatly strengthened by the rhetoric of the 'war on terror'.

Dwyer says that most of the other great powers on the planet are coming to see the United States as a rogue superpower. Yet everybody is deeply reluctant to confront the United States directly, since that would just hasten the collapse of the multilateral order they hope to save."

Would not 'empire' be a better word? But what does 'empire' mean in terms of global governance and globalization?

It means that the world will be made safe for America—by making the world American.

That is the argument of Thomas P. M. Barnett in his The Pentagon’s New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century according to this review in Monthly Review.

Barnett finds a strategic pattern in recent U.S. military intervention along the lines of connected or disconnected, or core and gap. He found that US deployments were concentrated in parts of the world effectively excluded from what he calls globalization’s 'functioning core.' This 'core' is defined by two main characteristics:

"A country or region is functioning if it can handle the content flows (ideas, services, money, and media) that come with integrating the national with the global economy.
A country or region is functioning when it seeks to harmonize its 'internal rule sets' with the emerging global rule of democracy, rule of law, and free markets—for example, by gaining admittance to the WTO.
Countries or regions are within the 'core'are North America, Europe, Russia, Japan, China (less so the interior), India (in a pockmarked sense), Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and Argentina, Brazil, Chile.

Barnett discovers that U.S. forces went almost exclusively to countries outside the 'core', (the "non-integrating gap")where global connectivity is thin or absent. This gap includes the Caribbean Rim, Africa, the Balkans, the Caucasus, Central Asia, the Middle East and Southwest Asia, and much of Southeast Asia.

A country is 'disconnected' when it fails to gain the confidence of multinational corporations, which limits foreign investment. This may be because the country is a theocracy, is spatially isolated, connected to the world via corrupt state-run telecommunications media, pursues illicit gain, treats its women as birth machines and therefore limits its labor force and export potential, or because it has too many raw materials that constitute its main exports.

Disconnectedness is the ultimate enemy. To be disconnected is to be isolated, deprived, repressed, and uneducated. These symptoms of disconnectedness define danger. It is the disconnectedness between the Core and the Gap that is the principal security threat to the US in particular, and the rest of the Core in general.

What does that mean in a geopoltical strategic sense? It means that the primary mission of the US---and therefore the US military--- is to extend connectivity between the Core and Gap as far as possible? That means empire does it not?

Not quite. It means globalization and governance. Barnett puts it this way:

"What does this new approach mean for this nation and the world over the long run? Let me be very clear about this: The boys are never coming home. America is not leaving the Middle East until the Middle East joins the world. It’s that simple. No exit means no exit strategy.....to abandon globalization’s future to those violent forces hell-bent on keeping this world divided between the connected and the disconnected is to admit that we no longer hold these truths to be self-evident: that all are created equal, and that all desire life, liberty, and a chance to pursue happiness. In short, we the people needs to become we the planet."

It is empire understood as a mode of governance American style.