Fight the wind or ride the balloon
Thomas P.M. Barnett’s “The Pentagon’s New Map” (2004) outlined how the sources of conflict in the world are concentrated in the non-integrating “gap” areas under cultural stress and disconnected from the broader economy.
As in Barnett’s past work, “America’s New Map: Restoring Our Global Leadership in an Era of Climate Change and Demographic Collapse” (2023) looks to a future worth creating.
The cultural stress in the U.S. these days, Barnett tells James Fallows on his podcast this week, is connected to America “losing its whiteness.” But that’s more connected to climate change than Americans of the Baby Boom generation care to admit.
Fallows writes:
Barnett is crystal-clear about climate change as a central driver of world politics, economics, and strategic tensions. And he emphasizes two related aspects of particular importance to the United States.
—One is climate’s role as driver of migrations—mainly south-to-north around the world, since that’s more feasible than east-west migration across the broad oceans. Millions of people are going to have to move, and sooner or later someone will have to accept them.
—The other is climate’s potential to be the next great motivating theme in American life, a rough counterpart to frontier-expansion in the late 1800s, and industrialization in the early 1900s, and military challenges in the mid-1900s.
You can read more about this as the central argument in his new book, and a recurring theme in the second half of our conversation. For instance: Barnett argues in his book that the US will naturally become more open to Latin American migrants, both because more of them will be coming, and because the US will have greater needs.
But how does America move past its impulse to shoot migrants at the border?
Barnett: It’s going to be accomplished by generational turnover.
The Boomers and the Gen Xers, both Cold War babies, what do they know? They know the sanctity of borders. It’s a very Cold War mentality. That’s what they know. That’s what they’re comfortable with. OK?
When you start talking millennials, Gen Zs—I got six of them as kids—they don’t have those instincts. They’re not gonna sign up for a 50 year Cold War with the Chinese to prevent them from doing—what? Building bridges around the world or something like that? They’re very skeptical about our military interventions. You’re seeing the resistance on our support to Israel right now. You’re seeing the wavering of our support to Ukraine. They’re very much focused on climate change.
They are very much convinced that they’re going to live in this (ethnically changing) world. I think they’re right. And they’re eager to address it. So think about who’s going to be running the system in 2050. The peaking and the points in history where we’re going to have the most adaptation are going to be probably in the 2030s, 40s, 50s. And that’s when Gen Z and the millennials are going to come online.
The mean age for a white person in America, Barnett says, is about 58, which turns out to be the mean age of people arrested or charged for the January 6th protest (as of April 2021 study; 94% white, average age 40). The nonwhite mean age in America is about 27. The Ancien Régime is fighting to hold on and hold out against change but will ultimately fail.
California over our lifetimes became a “majority minority” state. Guess what? The sky did not fall. It won’t in the rest of the country. The question is how much political violence has to occur before the Boomers let go of (or die out trying) the world they grew up as comfortably in as they don’t in this changing one.
Gen Z, Barnett tells Fallows, does not feel those winds of change. Like flying in a hot air balloon, they don’t feel the wind. Gen Zers are in it and part of it. The cultural changes that make Boomers tear their thinning hair out are natural for Gen Z.
It’s a fascinating 55 minutes of conversation. Especially the part about what a positive American “brand” could look like in a climate-changed future. Now, I have to get the (audio) book.
To my Gen Z friends: Hurry up every chance you get.