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February 09, 2010
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Thomas P.M. Barnett

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Thomas P.M. Barnett is senior managing director of Enterra Solutions LLC and a contributing editor for Esquire magazine. His latest book is "Great Powers: America and the World After Bush" (2009). His weekly WPR column, The New Rules, appears every Monday. Reach him and his blog at thomaspmbarnett.com.

Articles written by Thomas P.M. Barnett

The New Rules: China in Africa Means Frontier Integration

By Thomas P.M. Barnett 08 Feb 2010 | World Politics Review As one of the "last in" on globalization's bandwagon, China has naturally become an aggressive integrator of frontier economies. Nowhere is this expansion more apparent, and controversial, than in sub-Saharan Africa, where Chinese foreign direct investment and trade have increased several-fold in the past half-decade. That has triggered rising strategic interest in a region long-ignored by the West.

The New Rules: Why China Will Not Bury America

By Thomas P.M. Barnett 01 Feb 2010 | World Politics Review If the 2008 Olympics were China's big coming-out party, and 2009 the year that Beijing merely managed to save global capitalism with its rapid -- and accurate -- stimulus package, then one might assume 2010 holds even better things in store for the People's Republic. But China's "golden moment" is slipping away, and fast. In short, time is most definitely on our side.

The New Rules: The Fallacy of an Increasingly Dangerous World

By Thomas P.M. Barnett 25 Jan 2010 | World Politics Review It's taken as gospel by most pundits today that we live in an increasingly dangerous, deadly and unstable world. In retrospect, the Cold War has even taken on a nostalgic hue, reminding us of simpler, more manageable times. This creed is a complete lie, unforgivably peddled by fear-mongering "experts" as a way to justify their mindless schemes.

The New Rules: Drugs, Technology and the Coming Bio-Revolution

By Thomas P.M. Barnett 18 Jan 2010 | World Politics Review We are heading toward a world in which pharmaceutically enhanced living will be the norm throughout life, and not just among the chronically impaired and the elderly. While there's plenty of upside potential here, one significant challenge will be developing and enforcing a complex set of rules regarding who can do what while using which drugs.

The New Rules: Globalization's Next Wave of Integration

By Thomas P.M. Barnett 11 Jan 2010 | World Politics Review Thanks to the recent global financial crisis, we've heard much talk about the coming "de-globalization." Increasingly, deals no longer seem to suffice: Direct ownership is now desired. That may appear to signal de-globalization, but if it suggests anything, it is actually a deepening of connectivity -- dashed horizontal lines replaced by solid vertical ones.

The New Rules: The Naughties Were Plenty Nice

By Thomas P.M. Barnett 04 Jan 2010 | World Politics Review Pundits across America seem committed to the notion that our just-concluded decade deserves the moniker "worst ever," with the formulations ranging from Time's demonic "decade from hell" to Paul Krugman's self-flagellating "Big Zero." But if Krugman could call it "a decade in which nothing good happened," much of the planet might find our myopic bitterness a bit much.

The New Rules: Neocons are Alive and Kicking

By Thomas P.M. Barnett 21 Dec 2009 | World Politics Review If you thought the neocons were gone, better think again. Charles Krauthammer & Co. see no reason to surrender America's dominance to the Chinese simply because Beijing holds the pink slip on our national economy. And their mindset still animates most of what the GOP offers in opposition to President Barack Obama's magical apology tour.

The New Rules: China's Health Care Challenges Mirror America's

By Thomas P.M. Barnett 14 Dec 2009 | World Politics Review A funny thing happened on the way to China's presumed domination of the world's natural resources: It ran into the same core problem that America suffers -- namely, skyrocketing health care costs combined with too many citizens lacking access. In fact, health care reform stands at the center of both nations' efforts to address the "rebalancing" challenge revealed by last year's global financial panic.

The New Rules: Overleveraging American Foreign and Domestic Policy

By Thomas P.M. Barnett 07 Dec 2009 | World Politics Review Defense hawks are accusing Democrats of an ulterior motive in addressing health care in America: a longterm plot to curtail defense spending. This charge is at once hypocritical and correct, but not for the dark reasons ascribed to the Obama administration. Instead, the Democrats' implied plot to rebalance domestic versus foreign spending merely responds to inescapable realities.

The New Rules: The Bottom Line on Nation-Building

By Thomas P.M. Barnett 30 Nov 2009 | World Politics Review "Rebalancing" has been the watchword of President Barack Obama's foreign policy, and soon enough it will be applied to the international security burden among the world's great powers. One number explains why: It costs the U.S. $1 million a year to keep a soldier inside a theater of operations such as Afghanistan. With that as a bottom line, we must turn eastward and southward for future key allies.

The Austin Accords of March, 2031

By Thomas P.M. Barnett 24 Nov 2009 | World Politics Review AUSTIN, Texas -- Official representatives from the Tejas Confederation, the Northern Alliance of Mexican States, and the U.S. government signed a comprehensive treaty that will immediately "re-admit" the Tejas states to the American union, and submit to Congress formal pleas for new statehood on behalf of Baja California, Sonora, Chihuahua, Coahuila and Nuevo Leon.

The New Rules: Choosing Your 'Religion' for These Complex Times

By Thomas P.M. Barnett 23 Nov 2009 | World Politics Review The world today is experiencing an "awakening" of religious fervor, one triggered by globalization's rapid expansion around the planet over the past three decades. As the fear of assimilation takes hold in the global middle class, everybody wants to know, Who's running the show, and to what end? But when it comes to explaining the teleology of globalization, religions face significant secular competition.

The New Rules: Obama's Nuclear Focus at Odds with Rooseveltian Roots

By Thomas P.M. Barnett 16 Nov 2009 | World Politics Review By prioritizing economics above terrorism and climate change, President Barack Obama has begun to reorient America's grand strategy impulse back to its Rooseveltian roots. The one area where Obama has failed to maintain his pragmatic centrism is on the subject of nuclear weapons, arguably America's most successful 20th-century technological achievement.

The New Rules: Why America's War on Drugs Will Wane

By Thomas P.M. Barnett 09 Nov 2009 | World Politics Review For roughly four decades, a clear foreign policy rule set has existed between the U.S. and Latin America: U.S. foreign aid in exchange for aggressive efforts to curb illegal narcotics. By virtually all accounts, the strategy has been a massive failure. Now the old deal is off. New rules are on the way, whether we like it or not.

The New Rules: When Contractors Fill America's Foreign Policy Gap

By Thomas P.M. Barnett 02 Nov 2009 | World Politics Review Is the privatization of American development aid a case of the U.S. "outsourcing" sovereign functions, or of weak and failed states insourcing them? The question is not simply one of semantics but of directional causality: Is this stunning evolution the result of a supply-push on the part of the U.S. government or a demand-pull on the part of developing economies and failed states?

The New Rules: Prahalad's 'Bottom of the Pyramid' is Top-Notch Thinking

By Thomas P.M. Barnett 26 Oct 2009 | World Politics Review Most Western corporations cannot eke out that much more profit in increasingly saturated home markets. Instead they need to consider the "fortune" of disposable income that's being amassed at lower socio-economic levels, in both emerging markets and still underdeveloped economies, thanks to globalization's advance.

The New Rules: Seeing China's Present Through America's Past

By Thomas P.M. Barnett 19 Oct 2009 | World Politics Review Our nation was blessed to have a generation of reformers rise at the turn of the 20th century to tame our exceedingly rapacious style of capitalism. Without their efforts and the resulting new rules, our union would have once again come apart at the seams. That difficult and tumultuous journey is worth remembering as we contemplate China's stunningly similar trajectory today.

The New Rules: Obama's Nobel Says 'Thank You, America'

By Thomas P.M. Barnett 12 Oct 2009 | World Politics Review America awoke last Friday to the stunning news that President Barack Obama had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. As with all such awards, more was revealed about the selectors than the selected. So if the choice of Obama is inarguably premature, then what signal does the prize send? Simply put, Thank you, America.

The New Rules: The Next Half-Century's Great Waves of Change

By Thomas P.M. Barnett 05 Oct 2009 | World Politics Review Will humanity be ready for what happens when realizable lifespan jumps from 100 years to 150 in a generation's time? Science fiction naturally prefers exploring the "no" answer, because therein lies great drama. But my professional opinion is a lot more optimistic, so long as we understand the likely sequencing of this planet-shaping trend in relation to several others also now in the works.

The New Rules: For a New Economic Era, We Need New Allies

By Thomas P.M. Barnett 28 Sep 2009 | World Politics Review President Barack Obama's most telling statement at the United Nations last week spoke volumes about the limits of U.S. power in an interdependent world: "Those who used to chastise America for acting alone in the world cannot now stand by and wait for America to solve the world's problems alone." Atlas has put down the heavy globe and has neither the intention nor the wherewithal to pick it up again.