often portrayed as the boogeyman in American politics, but today's guest credits it with making the world better, more peaceful, and even more equitable.

In the future, he argues, it will continue to drive even more profound shifts in the way the world operates, with real challenges for American leadership and security.

He's Thomas P. Barnett, this week on "Story in the Public Square."

(uplifting music) (uplifting music continues) (gentle music) Hello, and welcome to "Story in the Public Square," where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from the Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

- And I'm G. Wayne Miller, also with Salve's Pell Center.

- Our guest today is a strategist and bestselling author whose new book is "America's New Map: Restoring Our Global Leadership in an Era of Climate Change and Demographic Collapse."

Thomas Barnett, thank you so much for being with us today.

- Thanks for having me on.

- You know, I can read your bio, and it's extensive, you've done a lot, but I'm curious, what do you think of yourself when you think about the kind of work that you do?

How do you really characterize what you do?

- Well, at its heart, I would say it's storytelling in the tradition of the grand narrative.

You know, it's attempt to orient the reader to what's gone on in the past that brought us to this point, how things stand now, and then projecting deep into the future, 3, 4, 5 decades.

So it's an attempt to kind of rise above today's events and to provide some clear sense as to where the inevitabilities of this world are taking us, so that we can start wrapping our mind around some of the things that may seem inconceivable from today's perspective, but I think we're gonna ultimately end up embracing as responses to these large structural changes the world is currently undergoing.

- Well, you know, so we first crossed paths 20-something years ago.

You had a hot new book out at the time then, called "The Pentagon's New Map," that was sort of all the buzz in the defense circles that I was running in.

And I remember it very well because it provided an explanation for a world that seemed very chaotic, and in particular, the link between the outliers to globalization, and then what we called the global War on Terrorism.

20 years later, when you look back, how did we do?

- Well, we did what I expected us to do, which is to get very good at dealing with terrorism.

And, by and large, I expected the globalization wave to have kind of swamped just about every region in the world by this point, and I think it has.

I mean, I don't think we can talk about parts of the world that are as disconnected from globalization as they were, say 20 years ago.

And it's that interconnectivity and that interdependence now that raises up this new possibility with climate change, which is really gonna hit those parts of the world that have most recently connected to the global economy.

- So, Thomas, as the saying goes, "What is past is prologue."

Your new book, "America's New Map," can you give us an overview of it, please?

- Sure, it starts with the idea, the story of America, after the Second World War, deciding to take the rules, and the norms, and the institutions that knitted together our, ultimately, 50 states into this economic powerhouse.

So think about the United States as sort of a miniature version of globalization, okay?

The amount of economic activity that goes on within our states, the free movement of goods, services, money, people, absolutely amazing and very, very powerful.

We sought to take that rule set, that American system, and basically project it upon the world.

We did it, at first, with what we called the free world, the countries in Asia and in Europe that we could kind of insulate off from the Soviet grasp.

We were so successful at that, that we attracted, ultimately, the emulation of China.

They marketized, and we start talking about a global economy in the '80s and '90s.

So tremendous success.

We took a global economy that was more than half of its population living in extreme poverty, and reduced that down to about 10% now.

And we basically doubled the share of the global population that can be considered middle class, to the point where we're now looking at a majority global middle class, which I would argue is the greatest achievement any country's ever made in this world.

But costs came with that immense transformation.

All that rise in economic activity and human activity altered the planet.

Scientists now propose that we date a new geological era roughly corresponding to the end of the Second World War, the invention of nukes, the detonation of nukes, but more importantly, in my mind, the spread of the US system, okay?

So we've altered the atmosphere, we've altered the oceans, we've reformatted the land, we've triggered the sixth great mass extinction period in planetary history.

All those things going on, creating a disjuncture between what I call Middle Earth, that half of humanity that's sitting between 30 degrees north and south of the equator, corresponds to my old Non-Integrating Gap, and it's gonna put those parts of the world under such enormous stress that we're looking at the potentiality for mass migration on a scale we've never considered before, south to north.

- So, Thomas, you know, you make a very compelling case in all of this.

I wanna linger for just a moment on globalization, because where so many analysts see globalization as the villain, the boogeyman in American politics or American economics, you actually see it as a manifestation of America shaping the world as we wanted it to be after 1945.

I think the question that I found myself asking, though, was, climate change and all of those consequences, were they an inevitable consequence of that success?

Was there a different moment that we could've, or a different path that we could've taken that still would've gotten us to peace and stability without all of these negative consequences?

- My answer would be no, in retrospect, and that it's not a great argument to say we should have held off the expansion of globalization around the world, because it lifted basically half of humanity out of years, decades, centuries of extreme poverty, and created that global middle class, which gives us an opportunity to rerun the same experiment we had in Western Europe and the United States at the turn of the 20th century, when our global, or when our individual middle classes arose.

You know, that triggered responses from the left in the form of communism, and from the right in the form of fascism.

We figured out how to rule from the middle through the two Roosevelts, Theodore and Franklin.

And we're at the point in history where we're rerunning that experiment on a global scale, and we need to understand that that competition between us and China is really for the hearts and minds, stomachs and wallets of that global middle class, and that that's the real rule set clash that'll determine the future of the planet.

- So, Thomas, you mentioned a profound shift in migration as a result of climate change.

Can you get into that in more detail?

What is happening, what is projected to happen, and what is the impact on the globe, and also on this country?

- We're talking about kind of a super-heating of the lower latitudes, that Middle Earth band that I described earlier, 30 degrees north and south of the equator, more than half of humanity, okay?

It's pushing weather systems towards the pole, towards the north, and on that basis, we're seeing species the world over migrate toward the poles and up in elevation, okay?

We're also seeing climate velocity, the movement of climates from one part of the world to the other.

My favorite example: The Wheat Belt in North America is heading 25 kilometers northward every year, so we're seeing this huge migration of species.

And it's obvious to me, that when you put people under the kind of stress that we saw, temperature, precipitation-wise this last summer, and we have good predictions that, basically, that Middle Earth band of half of humanity is going to experience increasingly unlivable temperatures and mega droughts, then we're looking on mass migration toward the poles for all sorts of desperate reasons, but then for economic opportunity reasons as well.

We are positing that roughly two Australias worth of livable, arable land is gonna disappear in the lower latitudes, but appear in the northern latitudes.

So that's the economic upside of all this change.

The north is gonna have a lot more opportunity to grow food and to resettle some portion of these people trying to escape this difficult environment in the lower latitudes.

- Thomas, that's a staggering piece of data.

You said two Australias worth of land lost in the middle latitudes, but become essentially arable, livable, productive land in the northern latitudes.

That's a massive transfer of wealth.

- That is the greatest transfer of wealth in human history.

I like to describe it, as I did in the book, as the biggest real estate transfer in human history, but no money's changing hands.

- And no armies are marching.

- No.

But we are looking at stresses, in terms of immigration, that will dwarf anything we're experiencing now.

And we can look at that and see it in terms of repelling invaders and whatnot, and we can cast these people as evil forces and threats to our civilization and whatnot, or we can think in resettlement terms, which the United States has done throughout its history.

Frankly, our entire country's built on migration.

Think back to the Civil War with Abraham Lincoln, the Homestead Act.

He's bringing in tens of thousands of German farmers in the middle of a civil war because he wants to integrate the West, he wants to keep food production up.

Canada did very similar things with its West.

I think we're looking at an extended period this century where, across the north, we're gonna be talking about resettling tens and even hundreds of millions of individuals.

- Is that feasible, and how does that happen?

- Well, there are two ways to look at it.

We can move them into this new arable land, which, on average, tends to be underpopulated.

Canada, the United States, especially Russia, relative to the rest of the world, vastly underpopulated.

Okay, then it's a question of the political will and capacity to do so.

I would argue, in North America, you got the United States, you got Canada, we're used to doing this kind of activity, we can handle it.

Can the Russians handle it without coming apart?

I'm not so sure.

Can the Europeans handle it, to whatever extent they can, without the European Union splitting into a north-south block on immigration?

Yet to be decided.

Are we gonna see the Chinese move northward?

Are we gonna see the Indians ultimately move northward, and will that put pressure on Russia?

I think so, but there's another way to look at this besides resettlement, and that is, and this is the core argument of the book, the north has to construct structures, institutions, relationships, all sorts of interstitial tissue, north-south, that basically socializes this risk that's gonna hit disproportionately along the lower latitudes, so that we can keep as much of a resilient population in place.

Do I think that can be done with official developmental aid?

No, I think it requires foreign direct investment, and if you want that kind of money to move in large quantities, then I think you have to establish some sort of certainty, politically, in these regions.

And I think the best way to do that is to take what the Europeans have done by extending eastward, state accession process, and get back into the business of growing the United States, in effect, offering a state accession track for countries in Latin America to ultimately join the United States, and on that basis, create the certainty that creates that foreign direct investment flows, and keeps as much of the population located resiliently in the south as possible.

- Wow.

- So you talk about political will, and, of course, that's a critical factor, but we are living at a time when this country, the Congress, is bitterly divided, and the events of the last several months put that on full display for anyone to see.

- [Thomas] Sure.

- Can that political will be summoned, and how would that be summoned, given where we are today in 2023?

- I'll be very brutally honest here.

I have little hope of changing the minds of the boomer ruling class, and I have not much better hope of changing the minds of the Gen Xers.

Okay, that's about 80%, 80, 85% of the US Congress right now, okay?

They're Cold War babies, they grew up in a different world.

They're very comfortable with Cold War dynamics, looking at an east-west world.

And, frankly, every time I go to Washington, you know, every room I walk into, they're declaring cold wars, hot wars, they're supplying dates, okay?

(Jim chuckles) The war with China is considered inevitable now, like that's the only choice we have moving forward.

I have little hope of changing their minds.

I think we're looking at the reality that we need them to age out.

And we really need the millennials, the Gen Zs, and ultimately the Gen Alphas, the people who are gonna be in charge mid-century, to step up and start reorienting our perspective from this focus on military bilateral competitions with other superpowers, and realize that the real superpower competition of this century is gonna be who integrates their south better, more intelligently, and with more stability-enhancing developments.

Because that global middle class is not just at risk in these lower latitudes.

That global middle class is the prize going forward.

We're talking about half of humanity, that has historically lived in an unprocessed, unbranded, unpackaged reality, in terms of consumption, they're moving into packaged, branded, processed consumption in the future.

And when you catch a population on that verge, you determine their case going forward for a very long time.

It's like the first time you buy a car or the first presidential vote you engage in, you tend to stick with that preference.

So think about that global middle class as this vast pool whose loyalties can be won, not just economically, in terms of brands, but also politically, in terms of the model they see as best providing stability and security for the wealth that they've recently amassed and are desperately seeking not to lose.

- You know, Thomas, we've spent a fair amount of time this morning already talking about the impact of climate change on this future global environment.

The other critical development that you identify is demographic collapse.

Could you explain that for us and for our audience?

How does that play into this world that you see in the century ahead?

- Typically, to join the global economy, you go through a demographic transition.

You urbanize, you industrialize, and the old rural rate of procreation, like say five or six childbirths per woman, drops dramatically, okay?

That creates an abnormally large generation because there's a lag there, and we call that the demographic dividend.

When you have a lot of workers relative to elders and children, that's the time you need to connect to the global economy.

And, frankly, that's the history of globalization since the Second World War.

America comes out of the Second World War demographically unharmed.

We're gonna run the world because we have the biggest economy, and we dominate manufacturing, until the Japanese come along with a three-decade demographic boom.

Then they're gonna run the world.

Then the Chinese come along.

But we're already starting to see the aging kick in there, just like it has already done with Japan and the United States.

So it's this ticket that gets you into globalization, the demographic transition, but the price is, once in, you tend to age rapidly.

Okay, so that's happening across the north, and, frankly, it's freaking out the United States because, in the United States, there's a racial component to it.

The demographic collapse that's happening in America is among the white population.

The non-white, immigrant-driven population is about 30 years younger in mean age.

So not only are we talking about the difference between, say boomers and millennials on addressing climate change versus getting very focused on China, we're talking about whites versus non-whites in this country.

And the sense among the white population right now is very nostalgic.

That's why Trump wins with that Make America Great notion, let's go back to what we remember.

Whereas, we have a non-white population that is much more open to rethinking the nature of our relationship with the outside world, and, frankly, much more open to rethinking our relationship with Latin America, because the big growth factor in America, demographically, for the last three, four decades, has been Latinos.

- So you've touched on this a little bit before, and I'm hoping you can get into a little more depth.

Who are the main competitors to the United States, and what do their models look like for the future?

- Sure.

The main competitors are the Europeans, the Russians, the Chinese, and the Indians, okay?

Europe right now has the base, excuse me, the best model of political integration, the state accession model, which they have done and used to basically double their numbers in the last 30 years.

Okay, they're now up to 27 members.

They have 10 members in the pipeline.

So they have a political model of integration, which works very well.

The question is, can they turn it south towards the Muslim world?

That'll determine how important they are as a superpower.

The Chinese have an economic model of integration, the Belt and Road Initiative.

They will literally cement your connectivity with the outside world.

They will also bring you into the world of 5G and networks.

But the catch there is, they insert their surveillance technologies with back doors that allows them to basically police your society in addition to their own.

We're looking at India coming up with a model that will hopefully be very service-centric, but that's yet to be seen because they're just starting to enjoy their demographic dividend.

And then, of course, the Russians have their old model of state integration, which is to cross the border, take hostages, and basically engage in a revanchist push to recreate the Russian Empire.

Meanwhile, you got the Americans, who started as 13 colonies, are now 50-member states, to include 574 sovereign Native American nations, 14 territories, and a federal district, which means we already have tiered membership, tiered citizenship.

But we haven't added a new star to our flag since 1959, which is unusual, because in seven generations of Barnetts, I'll be the first one to be born and to die under the same flag.

All my ancestors saw America get bigger and better over time.

The boomers have come in and kind of locked us into this border-defense mindset.

When I see the rest of our competition around the world basically getting bigger, getting better, planning for bigger, engaging the world on a bigger scale, meanwhile, we're pulling back, we're worried about our borders, we're worried more about state succession happening within our country than we are state accession, like the Europeans are creating.

- Thomas, you know, I think about the world that you're describing, and, you know, the United States spends more on defense than almost any, I think the next however many countries combined, right?

Next 10 countries combined.

Where should we be investing?

I'm not asking about whether or not to cut defense spending.

What capabilities, what investments do we need to be making in ourselves as a society to be ready for the world you're describing?

- Well, I would argue that, in terms of our relationship with the world, we gotta get off this model where it's simply, you're either in a defense pact with America or we're sanctioning you.

So you're either with us or against us.

Because when you look at that map of all the countries we sanction, that's where China is spreading its networks very dramatically.

So I think we gotta get off this model that says our primary way of interacting with you is on defense.

Because I see the future being security, non-zero sum, okay, the Chinese excelling along those lines.

- Can you just spell out that difference between a defense-minded approach and a security-minded approach?

- Defense is zero-sum.

The more defense I have, the less you have, in effect, whereas security is non-zero sum.

We can both build up our security, okay?

So look at the middle class that's emerged around the world.

They're not worried about interstate war, which is, you know, quite frankly, low in frequency right now, and has been low for several decades, okay?

They're looking at things that protect their assets.

And the Chinese are coming in with a model that basically says, "Hey, we're commoditizing things like freedom, stability, and security, it doesn't matter the source.

You can get it from us, or you can get it from the Americans.

But look how stable we are," says China.

"And look how crazy those Americans are, and how erratic they are, and how they will elect a new president every four years who changes everything and goes in a new direction."

So that's the focus I want us to have, a little more long-term in our perspective and more open to north-south integration, less obsessed with east-west integration.

What we are seeing right now, the nearshoring, the reshoring, the re-regionalization of economies, that is a huge advantage for us.

So I'd like to see anything that connects us to Latin America.

- You know, Thomas, we've got about a minute left here.

I'm curious, if we, you know, the book sort of looks out to 2070 ish, right?

2076 will be the tricentennial of the United States.

What will this country look like, and what will the world look like at that 300-year anniversary?

Literally about a minute.

- Right.

I think we're looking at those five major brands being five major blocks in the system.

I think there's nothing about this future that says to small nations, "Hey, you're better off going at this on your own, with your own resources."

I think climate change is creating a huge impetus for regional integration, for the pooling of risk.

So I look at an America in 2076, and I'm guessing that we're gonna be about 75, 80 states, and that the European Union will have spread into North Africa and into the Trans-Sahel, and will be 50 to 60 states.

And China will be its own large camp, as will India.

And the one country, out of those five, that I see possibly losing big time, possibly being partitioned overtime would be the Russians.

- Wow, wow, Thomas Barnett.

The book is "America's New Map."

It is a compelling read.

Thank you so much for being with us today.

Hey, that is all the time we have this week, but if you wanna know more about "Story in the Public Square," you can find us on social media or visit pellcenter.org where you can always catch up on previous episodes.

For G. Wayne Miller, I'm Jim Ludes, asking you to join us again next time for more "Story in the Public Square."

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