If you can get out in front of people with your ideas and your execution, you’ll attract the people who need to be pulled in. – Thomas P.M. Barnett
Barack Obama inherited a bankrupt economy, a bankrupt government, and a bankrupt foreign policy. – Thomas P.M. Barnett
Is there anything about cyberspace that particularly screams Air Force? Not really. If cyber warfare is going to be as all-encompassing as it’s made out to be by its vigorous proponents, then it will disseminate throughout the services even more than the drone phenomenon has. – Thomas P.M. Barnett
Some Western demographers have posited, due to the female shortage created by the one-child policy, that China will be forced to field a vast force – as in tens of millions strong – of wifeless men who’ll gladly wage wars around the planet to burn off all those unrequited hormones. – Thomas P.M. Barnett
So long as the global economy continues to recover, that remains Obama’s No. 1 claim to successful leadership. Nothing else even comes close. – Thomas P.M. Barnett
You can’t drag people from understanding to action. A customer isn’t actually at the last mile if you’re the one dragging her to the finish line. – Thomas P.M. Barnett
The Department of Homeland Security is a strategic feel good measure. It’s going to be the Department of Agriculture for the 21st century. TSA – thousands standing around. – Thomas P.M. Barnett
Wikistrat is my ninth start-up, so I’ve been through this process a few times. You have to go with what works. The power of example is compelling, so model the ideas that you want someone to understand. – Thomas P.M. Barnett
Frankly, the only thing China has in easy abundance is people and dirty coal. Neither is the asset they’re made out to be. – Thomas P.M. Barnett
Every U.S. president enters office promising stronger ties with our southern neighbors, only to thereupon largely ignore them. – Thomas P.M. Barnett
The Air Force has it far worse than the Navy in terms of existential fears, primarily due to the rapid rise and unbelievable dissemination of drones, where seemingly now every military unit has their own miniature air wing of what would have recently passed as toys. – Thomas P.M. Barnett
To ask a country with 750 million people living on less than a dollar a day to optimize their development for the environment as opposed to getting food in the mouths of these people and giving them a decent lifestyle, that’s just a little bit too much to ask. – Thomas P.M. Barnett
An economically confident America has – since becoming a world power at the start of the 20th century – tended toward global engagement. It is during times of economic stress (1930s, 1970s) that America has become more withdrawn. – Thomas P.M. Barnett
The most important thing you need to know about the Pentagon is that it is not in charge of today’s wars but rather tomorrow’s wars. – Thomas P.M. Barnett
Despite living in this post-9/11 age of transnational terrorism, the risk of death during air travel has plummeted to the point where we now measure it in the ‘per billions’ of passengers. – Thomas P.M. Barnett
If America is addicted to foreign money and foreign oil, then China is addicted to foreign supplies of just about every commodity known to man – save highly polluting coal. – Thomas P.M. Barnett
Historians are going to look back on rising China and say America, at least under the Bush years, did not get that wrong. – Thomas P.M. Barnett
Transnational terrorism, in the form of the Salafi Jihadist movement, is fundamentally a function of globalization. – Thomas P.M. Barnett
Women waited 144 years before earning suffrage. If a mature, multiparty democracy was so darn easy, everybody would have one. – Thomas P.M. Barnett
The Marines are like my West Highland Terrier. They get up every morning, they want to dig a hole, and they want to kill something. – Thomas P.M. Barnett
China’s headlong rush to industrialize was pursued with the most Marxist of prejudices – bending nature to man’s will. That’s a desperately hard trick to pull off when one fifth of humanity, having previously subsisted on 7 percent of the world’s freshwater supply, decides that it wants to instantaneously increase its caloric intake. – Thomas P.M. Barnett
In the end, for all of Obama’s grand rhetoric on ridding the world of nuclear weapons, history has doomed him to preside over the emergence of two rogue nuclear regimes (North Korea and Iran). – Thomas P.M. Barnett
We need to remind ourselves that our ultimate goal is not to reduce greenhouse gases or global warming per se but to improve the quality of life and the environment. We all want to leave the planet in decent shape for our kids. Radically reducing greenhouse gas emissions is not necessarily the best way to achieve that. – Thomas P.M. Barnett
There is no battle space the U.S. Military cannot access. They said we couldn’t do Afghanistan. We did it with ease. They said we couldn’t do Iraq. We did it with 150 combat casualties in six weeks. We did it so fast we weren’t prepared for their collapse. There is nobody we can’t take down. The question is, what do you do with the power? – Thomas P.M. Barnett
Here’s my favorite bonehead concept from the 1990s in the Pentagon: the theory of anti-access, area-denial asymmetrical strategies. Why do we call it that? Because it’s got all those A’s lined up I guess. This is gobbledygook for ‘If the United States fights somebody, we’re going to be huge. They’re going to be small.’ – Thomas P.M. Barnett
America has remained highly engaged in global affairs throughout decades of growing energy dependency, so it’s hard to imagine it would disengage if its quest for energy self-sufficiency failed – especially amidst a world of heightened resource competition. – Thomas P.M. Barnett
