Thomas P.M. Barnett Quotes
During the cold war, it was easy for the Pentagon to justify its budget, as the Soviets essentially sized our forces for us. We simply counted up their stuff and either bought more of the same or upgraded our technology.
Barnett, Thomas P.M. The Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century. G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2004.
In 1992 Russia was in terrible economic shape after the fall of the Soviet Union. Keeping up with the United States military expenditures had bankrupted the Russians. The United States which had strategically increased its defense spending to break the Russian economy if they tried to keep up. However, the U. S. expenditures had forced America into a deficit spending period which produced a national deficit greater than all the previous cumulative deficits in our history. So the American economy was not in great shape either. Meanwhile, Japan, whose constitution (imposed by America after WWII) forbade having a military and funding a military. The result was the Japanese economy was growing at a much more rapid rate, and did not have the unbalanced budget of the United States and Russia. Hence, Tsongas’ observation.
Thomas P.M. Barnett (born 1962) is an American military geostrategist and former chief analyst at Wikistrat. He developed a geopolitical theory that divided the world into "the Functioning Core" and the "Non-Integrating Gap" that made him particularly notable prior to the 2003 U.S. Invasion of Iraq when he wrote an article for Esquire in support of the military action entitled "The Pentagon's New Map" (which would later become the title of a book that would elaborate on his geopolitical theories). The central thesis of his geopolitical theory is that the connections the globalization brings between countries (including network connectivity, financial transactions, and media flows) are synonymous with those countries with stable governments, rising standards of living, and "more deaths by suicide than by murder". These countries form the Functioning Core. These regions contrast with those where globalization has not yet penetrated, which is synonymous with political repression, poverty, disease, and mass-murder, and conflict. These areas make up the Non-Integrating Gap.
