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Show me where globalization is thick with network connectivity, financial transactions, liberal media flows, and collective security, and I will show you regions featuring stable governments, rising standards of living, and more deaths by suicide than murder. These parts of the world I call the Functioning Core, or Core. . . . But show me where globalization is thinning or just plain absent, and I will show you regions plagued by politically repressive regimes, widespread poverty and disease, routine mass murder, and—most important—the chronic conflicts that incubate the next generation of global terrorists. These parts of the world I call the Non-Integrating Gap, or Gap. . . . So where do we schedule the U.S. military’s next round of away games? The pattern that has emerged since the end of the cold war suggests a simple answer: in the Gap.17

In reality, this new map is just the old map—the geography of empire. Barnett even sounds a bit like economic historian Immanuel Wallerstein, using the “periphery” and “core.”18 Or consider how John Stuart Mill famously described colonial geography at the dawn of mercantilist capitalism: “Our West Indian colonies cannot be regarded as countries with a productive capital of their own. . . . [Instead, they] are places where England finds it convenient to carry on the production of sugar, coffee and a few other tropical commodities.”19

Capitalism has always functioned as an international system. The origins of this mighty global economy arose from connections that stretched across the globe and involved the spice trade of the Dutch East Indies, the Atlantic slave trade, and the flow from Russia and Poland of grain, honey, and timber. And it may well be along these same lines that the world capitalist economy begins to unravel. Barnett’s Gap is not so much excluded (or, as he says, “nonintegrated”) as it is historically exploited and politically subjugated. Thus, its states are too often weak and corrupt. Now, add climate change, and this geography—which had been making some progress in terms of the United Nations’ human-development index of well-being measured primarily in terms of income, life expectancy, and education—will sink into greater misery and violent chaos.20

Hard State versus Failed State

Political adaptation presents stark choices. There is a real risk that strong states with developed economies will succumb to a politics of xenophobia, racism, police repression, surveillance, and militarism and thus transform themselves into fortress societies while the rest of the world slips into collapse. By that course, developed economies would turn into neofascist islands of relative stability in a sea of chaos. But a world in climatological collapse—marked by hunger, disease, criminality, fanaticism, and violent social breakdown—will overwhelm the armed lifeboat. Eventually, all will sink into the same morass.

However, another path is possible. Progressive political adaptation—coupled with aggressive and immediate mitigation—can involve moving toward greater cooperation and economic redistribution within states and between North and South. I will touch on these ideas at the end of this book. Unfortunately, the early stages of political adaptation do not inspire much confidence. The politics of the armed lifeboat seem to be winning.

CHAPTER 3

War for a Small Planet: Adaptation As Counterinsurgency

The United States possesses overwhelming conventional military superiority. This capability has pushed its enemies to fight US forces unconventionally, mixing modern technology with ancient techniques of insurgency and terrorism. . . . Defeating such enemies presents a huge challenge to the Army and Marine Corps.

—FM 3-24, US Military Counterinsurgency Field Manual, December 2006

IT WAS A SPLENDID little war in a pathetic little country—a classic case of old meets new, banana republic meets failed state. No one was sure why, but the two main ethnic groups were at war; refugees needed humanitarian assistance,