Thomas Barnett agrees with me (and the President)

Thomas Barnett is a respected strategist with the Pentagon and an author who wants to spread democracy and capitalist globalization to poorer states, especially those who breed terrorism. President Bush obviously agrees and has started the ball rolling in Iraq. This article says Barnett also agrees with Bush on some things:

Barnett argues that America's strategy ought to be the protection and expansion of the Core and the gradual elimination of Gap regimes that resist globalization and liberal democracy. He supported the invasion of Iraq for the same reasons as Paul Wolfowitz, the former deputy defence secretary turned World Bank chief: both hoped the event would set off a Big Bang across the Middle East, act as a catalyst to bring democracy and a market economy to the region; and shrink the Gap. Though this view terrifies European elites, Barnett is not the caricature they may imagine. He opposes those in the Pentagon who believe that China will take over the Soviet Union's erstwhile role as America's superpower enemy. Instead, he argues, America should welcome the development of China; work with it to expand the Core against the Gap; and hope for minimal violence when the Communists eventually lose power as a result of the economic boom of recent years.

The same article Goes on to discuss the increasing irrelevance of platforms (carriers, fighters, tanks) in today's warfare, something I discussed in a previous post:

Barnett's old boss is a man called Art Cebrowski, brought into the Pentagon by Rumsfeld immediately after 9/11 to advise on "defence transformation". Cebrowski is the godfather of what is called Network Centric Warfare: the concept that war is being transformed by a shift from simply building ever-more technologically advanced and expensive platforms (such as stealth fighters or aircraft carriers), to network-centric warfare, where the emphasis is on networking platforms to leverage their effects via "information dominance".
In this vision, the sensor, command and control, and engagement "grids" of Network Centric Warfare locate and destroy targets across the globe, from individual sensor to soldier to ship to unmanned drone to satellite. This "system of systems", it is argued, will fundamentally alter the nature of warfare because it will largely eliminate what until now has been the most important fact of human conflict: the inherent uncertainty of a complex world that produces "the fog of war".