An Operating Theory of the World

WHEN THE COLD WAR ENDED, we thought the world had changed. It had-but not in the way we thought.

When the Cold War ended, our real challenge began.

The United States had spent so much energy during those years trying to prevent the horror of global war that it forgot the dream of global peace. As far as most Pentagon strategists were concerned, America's status as the world's sole military superpower was something to preserve, not something to exploit, and because the future was unknowable, they assumed we needed to hedge against all possibilities, all threats, and all futures. America was better served adopting a wait-and-see strategy, they decided, one that assumed some grand enemy would arise in the distant future. It was better than wasting precious resources trying to manage a messy world in the near term. The grand strategy...was to avoid grand strategies.

I know that sounds incredible, because most people assume there are all sorts of "master plans" being pursued throughout the U.S. Government. But, amazingly, we are still searching for a vision to replace the decades-long containment strategy that America pursued to counter the Soviet threat. Until September 11, 2001, the closest thing the Pentagon had to a comprehensive view of the world was simply to call it "chaos" and "uncertainty," two words that implied the impossibility of capturing a big-picture perspective of the world's potential futures. Since September 11, at least we have an enemy to attach to all this "chaos" and "uncertainty," but that still leaves us describing horrible futures to be prevented, not positive ones to be created.

Today the role of the Defense Department in U.S. national security is being radically reshaped by new missions arising in response to a new international security environment. It is tempting to view this radical redefinition of the use of U.S. military power around the world as merely the work of senior officials in the Bush Administration, but that is to confuse the midwife with the miracle of birth. This Administration is only doing what any other administration would eventually have had to do: recast America's national security strategy from its Cold War, balance-of-power mind-set to one that reflects the new strategic environment. The terrorist attacks of 9/11 simply revealed the yawning gap between the military we built to win the Cold War and the different one we need to build in order to secure globalization's ultimate goal-the end of war as we know it.

America stands at the peak of a world historical arc that marks globalization's tipping point. When we chose to resurrect the global economy following the end of World War II, our ambitions were at first quite limited: we sought to rebuild globalization on only three key pillars-North America, Western Europe, and Japan. After the Cold War moved beyond nuclear brinkmanship to peaceful coexistence, we saw that global economy begin to expand across the 1980s to include the so-called emerging markets of South America and Developing Asia. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, we had a sense that a new world order actually was in the making, although we lacked both the words and the vision to enunciate what could be meant by that phrase, other than that the East-West divide no longer seemed to matter. Instead of identifying new rule sets in security, we chose to recognize the complete lack of one, and therefore, as regional security issues arose in the post-Cold War era, America responded without any global principles to guide its choices. Sometimes we felt others' pain and responded, sometimes we simply ignored it.

America could behave in this fashion because the boom times of the new economy suggested that security issues could take a backseat to the enormous changes being inflicted by the Information Revolution. If we were looking for a new operating theory of the world, surely this was it. Connectivity would trump all, erasing the business cycle, erasing national borders, erasing the very utility of the state in managing a global security order that seemed more virtual than real. What was the great global danger as the new millennium approached? It was a software bug that might bring down the global information grid. What role did the Pentagon play in this first-ever, absolutely worldwide security event-this defining moment of the postindustrial age? Virtually none.

So America drifted through the roaring nineties, blissfully unaware that globalization was speeding ahead with no one at the wheel. The Clinton Administration spent its time tending to the emerging financial and technological architecture of the global economy, pushing worldwide connectivity for all it was worth in those heady days, assuming that eventually it would reach even the most disconnected societies. Did we as a nation truly understand the political and security ramifications of encouraging all this connectivity? Could we understand how some people might view this process of cultural assimilation as a mortal threat? As something worth fighting against? Was a clash of civilizations inevitable?

Amazingly, the U.S. military engaged in more crisis-response activity around the world in the 1990s than in any previous decade of the Cold War, yet no national vision arose to explain our expanding role. Globalization seemed to be remaking the world, but meanwhile the U.S. military seemed to be doing nothing more than babysitting chronic security situations on the margin. Inside the Pentagon, these crisis responses were exclusively filed under the new rubric "military operations other than war," as if to signify their lack of strategic meaning. The Defense Department spent the 1990s ignoring its own workload, preferring to plot out its future transformation for future wars against future opponents. America was not a global cop, but at best a global fireman pointing his hose at whichever blaze seemed most eye-catching at the moment. We were not trying to make the world safe for anything; we just worked to keep these nasty little blazes under control. America was hurtling forward without looking forward. In nautical terms, we were steering by our wake.

Yet a pattern did emerge with each American crisis response in the 1990s. These deployments turned out to be overwhelmingly concentrated in the regions of the world that were effectively excluded from globalization's Functioning Core-namely, the Caribbean Rim, Africa, the Balkans, the Caucasus, Central Asia, the Middle East and Southwest Asia, and much of Southeast Asia. These regions constitute globalization's "ozone hole," or what I call its Non-Integrating Gap, where connectivity remains thin or absent. Simply put, if a country was losing out to globalization or rejecting much of its cultural content flows, there was a far greater chance that the United States would end up sending troops there at some point across the 1990s. But because the Pentagon viewed all these situations as "lesser includeds," there was virtually no rebalancing of the U.S. military to reflect the increased load. We knew we needed a greater capacity within the ranks for nation building, peacekeeping, and the like, but instead of beefing up those assets to improve our capacity for managing the world as we found it, the Pentagon spent the nineties buying a far different military-one best suited for a high-tech war against a large, very sophisticated military opponent. In short, our military strategists dreamed of an opponent that would not arise for a war that no longer existed.

That dilemma is at the heart of the work that I have been doing since the end of the Cold War. How do we describe this threat environment? How did we fail to heed all the warning signs leading up to 9/11? How do we prepare for future war? Where will those wars be? How might they be prevented? What should America's role be in both...