Mr. Barnett breaks down the countries of the world into two groups; the functioning core and the non-integrating gap. The functioning core countries are those countries where globalization has taken root. Those are the countries with network connectivity, free trade and financial transactions, liberal media, and collective security. These regions have stable governments, rising standards of living, and more deaths by suicide than murder. Examples of these functioning states are the countries of North America, much of South America, the European Union, Russia, Japan, China, India, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. This equates to about 2/3 world’s population.
Barnett says the non integrating gap countries are where our biggest threats are. These are the countries in the world were globalization is thinning or absent. Regions where there are politically repressing regimes, where there is widespread poverty and disease, mass murder, and are incubators for global terrorism. These are the countries where not so coincidentally the U.S. military responses have been since the end of the Cold War. Barnett states that the U.S. is morally obligated to extend globalization to these gap countries. This includes the Caribbean rim, most of Africa, the Balkans, Central Asia, the Middle East, southwest Asia and much of Southeast Asia. There are outliers such as Israel which is isolated in the gap and North Korea which is in the core.
His stance is that a country’s potential to warrant a U.S. military response is inversely related to its globalization connectivity. He points out that Sudan and Afghanistan are where Al Qaida was first based. Other problem areas are Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen none of which can be considered globalized.
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So one of the challenges here is to stop the ability of the terrorist networks from gaining access to the core via the seam states. The seam states