If your country is friendly toward Russia, China, or Iran, then today’s American Government is probably applying subversion, economic sanctions, or maybe even planning a coup, or (if none of those will succeed) probably is war-gaming now for a possible military invasion and permanent military occupation, of your country. These things have been done to Russia, Iran, China, Yugoslavia, Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Cuba, Ukraine, Georgia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, and some other countries.
However, after the 9/11 attacks in America, the US Government has added another system for selecting countries to immiserate, and those are mainly the countries that already suffer the most misery — some of them are countries that were listed above, but others (many others) are not, and are selected instead largely because they are already in misery, and also because America — that is, the Deep State which controls it, America’s hundreds of billionaires, who control international corporations and the press in America, and not just control the politicians who win public offices — wants to control the given target country in order to extract its natural resources or simply in order to place some of US military bases there so as to be better able to invade other countries.
This relatively new category of America’s targeted enemies was invented, mainly, in 2003 and 2004, by Thomas P. M. Barnett, a Professor at the US Naval College and columnist and writer for various popular magazines, as well as of best-selling books. His 2004 book The Pentagon’s New Map, presents that map, to show the areas, mainly around the Equator and including all of Central America; plus all of South America except Chile, Argentina, and Brazil; plus all of Africa except South Africa, all countries of which are supposedly not connected to globalization — i.e., they are Third World instead of First World — and he says that they are unstable and therefore need to be policed by the world’s policeman, which is the US Government, to serve there as the judge, jury, and executioner, of anyone who lives there and who resists that judge, jury, and executioner.
His key statement is on page 227, “A country’s potential to warrant a US military response is inversely related to its globalization connectivity.” Here is the map, which shows which countries are supposedly high globalization connectivity and therefore inappropriate for America to sanction, coup, or invade and occupy; and which countries are supposedly low globalization connectivity and therefore appropriate for America to sanction, coup, or invade and occupy:
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As can be seen there, the following countries are not to be policed by the US Government: Canada, US, Mexico, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, UK, Greenland, Iceland, EU, Switzerland, Ukraine, Georgia, South Africa, Russia, Mongolia, China, India, Japan, South Korea, Australia, N.Z.
He calls those the “Globalized Functioning Core.” All others are “the Non-Integrated Gap” countries, America’s virtual free-fire zones, to control so as to ‘prevent terrorism’.
Instead of international law being what the United Nations says it is, this “new map” theory says that international law in the “Non-Integrated Gap” countries should be what the US Government says it is.
According to Barnett’s theory, as he expressed it in its original version in an Esquire magazine article titled “Why the Pentagon Changes Its Maps: And why we’ll keep going to war,” he listed these countries as “THE GAP” or third-world countries, “My list of real trouble for the world in the 1990s, today, and tomorrow, starting in our own backyard” (and these are listed here by the names that he gave to them): Haiti, Colombia, Brazil and Argentina, Former Yugoslavia, Congo and Rwanda/Burundi, Angola, South Africa, Israel-Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Somalia, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, North Korea, Indonesia. Then he listed “CORE MEMBERS I WORRY WE MAY LOSE:” China, Russia, India.
So, if you live in any of those countries, then Barnett, and the many US generals who respect his theory, and the US billionaires, who want the resources in those countries or else just want military bases there, view you as an enemy, not as a citizen of a sovereign foreign country. His Esquire article says, “it is always possible to fall off this bandwagon called globalization. And when you do, bloodshed will follow. If you are lucky, so will American troops.” He assumes that you need a “policeman” from America because what your own country provides is too primitive. And, “Conversely, if a country is largely functioning within globalization, we tend not to have to send our forces there to restore order or eradicate threats.”
On 22 August 2017, Thierry Meyssan at Voltairenet headlined “The US military project for the world” and gave his progressive critical interpretation of Barnett’s theory by placing it into the long-term evolution of US geostrategy. On 26 September 2004, Razib Khan gave his admiring racist-fascist or ideologically nazi interpretation of it, under the headline “IQ And The Non-Integrating Gap”. He assumed there that lower-income countries are “lower IQ” and therefore need to be directed according to the master’s whip, not as sovereign countries.
The book’s publisher places online an informative excerpt from the work. under the headline “An Operating Theory of the World” and Barnett says there:
As the ‘vision guy,’ my job was to generate and deliver a compelling brief that would mobilize the Defense Department toward generating the future fighting force demanded by the post-9/11 strategic environment. Over the next two years I gave that brief well over a hundred times to several thousand Defense Department officials. Through this intense give-and-take, my material grew far beyond my original inputs to include the insider logic driving all of the major policy decisions promulgated by the department’s senior leadership. Over time, senior military officials began citing the brief as a Rosetta stone for the Bush Administration’s new national security strategy.
The strategy remains in force, though there now is a return to focusing on the main enemies being Russia, China, and Iran. The “gap” countries are currently viewed not only according to the “gap” but also according to their relationships to Russia, China, and Iran.
Reprinted with permission from Strategic Culture Foundation.
