Bezalel Peleg; Peter Sudhölter:
Introduction to the Theory of Cooperative Games (Theory and Decision Library C) - hardcover
2007, ISBN: 9783540729440
Putnam Adult. Good. 24 x 15cm. Hardcover. 2004. 448 pages. Ex-library.<br>A former senior military analyst with t he U.S.Naval War College offers a thought-provoking analysis of t h… More...
Putnam Adult. Good. 24 x 15cm. Hardcover. 2004. 448 pages. Ex-library.<br>A former senior military analyst with t he U.S.Naval War College offers a thought-provoking analysis of t he United States and global security that utilizes recent militar y history and strategy; economic, political, and cultural factors ; and foreign policy and security issues to examine the future of war and peace, as well as America's role in the international co mmunity. 100,000 first printing. 100,000 first printing. Editori al Reviews Review This bold and important book strive s to be a practical strategy for a Second American Century. In th is brilliantly argued work, Thomas Barnett calls globalization th is countryÃ's gift to history and explains why its wide dissemina tion is critical to the security of not only America but the enti re world. As a senior military analyst for the U.S. Naval War Col lege, Barnett is intimately familiar with the culture of the Pent agon and the State Department (both of which he believes are due for significant overhauls). He explains how the Pentagon, still i n shock at the rapid dissolution of the once evil empire, spent t he 1990s grasping for a long-term strategy to replace containment . The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Barnett argues, re vealed the gap between an outdated Cold War-era military and a ra dically different one needed to deal with emerging threats. He be lieves that America is the prime mover in developing a future wor th creating not because of its unrivaled capacity to wage war, bu t due to its ability to ensure security around the world. Further , he believes that the U.S. has a moral responsibility to create a better world and the way he proposes to do that is by bringing all nations into the fold of globalization, or what he calls conn ectedness. Eradicating disconnectedness, therefore, is the defini ng security task of our age. His stunning predictions of a U.S. a nnexation of much of Latin America and Canada within 50 years as well as an end to war in the foreseeable future guarantee that th e book will be controversial. And that's good. The Pentagon's New Map deserves to be widely discussed. Ultimately, however, the mo st impressive aspects of the book is not its revolutionary ideas but its overwhelming optimism. Barnett wants the U.S. to pursue t he dream of global peace with the same zeal that was applied to p reventing global nuclear war with the former Soviet Union. High-l evel civilian policy makers and top military leaders are already familiar with his vision of the future?this book is a briefing fo r the rest of us and it cannot be ignored. --Shawn Carkonen From Publishers Weekly Barnett, professor at the U.S. Naval War Colle ge, takes a global perspective that integrates political, economi c and military elements in a model for the postâ?September 11 wor ld. Barnett argues that terrorism and globalization have combined to end the great-power model of war that has developed over 400 years, since the Thirty Years War. Instead, he divides the world along binary lines. An increasingly expanding Functioning Core of economically developed, politically stable states integrated int o global systems is juxtaposed to a Non-Integrating Gap, the most likely source of threats to U.S. and international security. The gap incorporates Andean South America, the Caribbean, sub-Sahara n Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia and much of southwest Asi a. According to Barnett, these regions are dangerous because they are not yet integrated into globalism's core. Until that process is complete, they will continue to lash out. Barnett calls for a division of the U.S. armed forces into two separate parts. One w ill be a quick-strike military, focused on suppressing hostile go vernments and nongovernment entities. The other will be administr atively oriented and assume responsibility for facilitating the t ransition of gap systems into the core. Barnett takes pains to de ny that implementing the new policy will establish America either as a global policeman or an imperial power. Instead, he says the policy reflects that the U.S. is the source of, and model for, g lobalization. We cannot, he argues, abandon our creation without risking chaos. Barnett writes well, and one of the book's most co mpelling aspects is its description of the negotiating, infightin g and backbiting required to get a hearing for unconventional ide as in the national security establishment. Unfortunately, marketi ng the concepts generates a certain tunnel vision. In particular, Barnett, like his intellectual models Thomas Friedman and Franci s Fukuyama, tends to accept the universality of rational-actor mo dels constructed on Western lines. There is little room in Barnet t's structures for the apocalyptic religious enthusiasm that has been contemporary terrorism's driving wheel and that to date has been indifferent to economic and political factors. That makes hi s analytical structure incomplete and more useful as an intellect ual exercise than as the guide to policy described in the book's promotional literature. Copyright ® Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From Bookli st It has been generally recognized that the end of the cold war and the emerging threat of international terrorism presented new challenges in planning American diplomatic and military strategy. What has often been lacking is a coherent, integrated vision tha t assesses the new threats to American interests and provides a c omprehensive plan for coping with them. Barnett, a senior strateg ic researcher and professor at the U.S. Naval War College, presen ts his operating theory, which sees the principal threat to Ameri can security arising from dysfunctional or so-called failed state s, which provide fertile ground for the recruitment and sustenanc e of terrorists. On the other hand, as such past adversaries as R ussia and China are integrated into global economic and political systems, they are less threatening. To counter these threats, Ba rnett suggests some bold, even revolutionary, changes in our mili tary structure and in the dispersion and utilization of our force s. Of course, both his analyses and remedies are open to debate, but Barnett's compelling assertions are worthy of strong consider ation and are sure to provoke controversy. Jay Freeman Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved Review His w ork should be read not only by policy makers and pundits, but by anyone who wants to understand how the world works in the Age of Terror. -Sherri Goodman; Former Deputy Undersecretary of Defense Thomas Barnett is one of the most thoughtful and original think ers that this generation of national security analysts has produc ed. -John Petersen, President, the Arlington Institute Barnett puts the world into context. -Esquire About the Author Thomas P. M. Barnett is a senior adviser to the Office of the Secretary of Defense, Central Command, Special Operations Command, the Joi nt Staff and the Joint Forces Command. He formerly served as a se nior strategic researcher and professor at the U.S. Naval War Col lege and as Assistant for Strategic Futures in the OSD's Office o f Force Transformation. He is a founding partner of the New Rule Sets Project LLC, and his work has appeared in The New York Times , The Washington Post, The Christian Science Monitor, and Esquire , where he is now a contributing editor. Excerpt. ® Reprinted b y permission. All rights reserved. Preface An Operating Theory of the World WHEN THE COLD WAR : ED, we thought the world had ch anged. It had-but not in the way we thought. When the Cold War e nded, our real challenge began. The United States had spent so m uch energy during those years trying to prevent the horror of glo bal war that it forgot the dream of global peace. As far as most Pentagon strategists were concerned, America's status as the worl d's sole military superpower was something to preserve, not somet hing to exploit, and because the future was unknowable, they assu med we needed to hedge against all possibilities, all threats, an d all futures. America was better served adopting a wait-and-see strategy, they decided, one that assumed some grand enemy would a rise in the distant future. It was better than wasting precious r esources trying to manage a messy world in the near term. The gra nd strategy...was to avoid grand strategies. I know that sounds incredible, because most people assume there are all sorts of mas ter plans being pursued throughout the U.S. Government. But, amaz ingly, we are still searching for a vision to replace the decades -long containment strategy that America pursued to counter the So viet threat. Until September 11, 2001, the closest thing the Pent agon had to a comprehensive view of the world was simply to call it chaos and uncertainty, two words that implied the impossibilit y of capturing a big-picture perspective of the world's potential futures. Since September 11, at least we have an enemy to attach to all this chaos and uncertainty, but that still leaves us desc ribing horrible futures to be prevented, not positive ones to be created. Today the role of the Defense Department in U.S. nation al security is being radically reshaped by new missions arising i n response to a new international security environment. It is tem pting to view this radical redefinition of the use of U.S. milita ry power around the world as merely the work of senior officials in the Bush Administration, but that is to confuse the midwife wi th the miracle of birth. This Administration is only doing what a ny other administration would eventually have had to do: recast A merica's national security strategy from its Cold War, balance-of -power mind-set to one that reflects the new strategic environmen t. The terrorist attacks of 9/11 simply revealed the yawning gap between the military we built to win the Cold War and the differe nt one we need to build in order to secure globalization's ultima te goal-the end of war as we know it. America stands at the peak of a world historical arc that marks globalization's tipping poi nt. When we chose to resurrect the global economy following the e nd of World War II, our ambitions were at first quite limited: we sought to rebuild globalization on only three key pillars-North America, Western Europe, and Japan. After the Cold War moved beyo nd nuclear brinkmanship to peaceful coexistence, we saw that glob al economy begin to expand across the 1980s to include the so-cal led emerging markets of South America and Developing Asia. When t he Berlin Wall fell in 1989, we had a sense that a new world orde r actually was in the making, although we lacked both the words a nd the vision to enunciate what could be meant by that phrase, ot her than that the East-West divide no longer seemed to matter. In stead of identifying new rule sets in security, we chose to recog nize the complete lack of one, and therefore, as regional securit y issues arose in the post-Cold War era, America responded withou t any global principles to guide its choices. Sometimes we felt o thers' pain and responded, sometimes we simply ignored it. Ameri ca could behave in this fashion because the boom times of the new economy suggested that security issues could take a backseat to the enormous changes being inflicted by the Information Revolutio n. If we were looking for a new operating theory of the world, su rely this was it. Connectivity would trump all, erasing the busin ess cycle, erasing national borders, erasing the very utility of the state in managing a global security order that seemed more vi rtual than real. What was the great global danger as the new mill ennium approached? It was a software bug that might bring down th e global information grid. What role did the Pentagon play in thi s first-ever, absolutely worldwide security event-this defining m oment of the postindustrial age? Virtually none. So America drif ted through the roaring nineties, blissfully unaware that globali zation was speeding ahead with no one at the wheel. The Clinton A dministration spent its time tending to the emerging financial an d technological architecture of the global economy, pushing world wide connectivity for all it was worth in those heady days, assum ing that eventually it would reach even the most disconnected soc ieties. Did we as a nation truly understand the political and sec urity ramifications of encouraging all this connectivity? Could w e understand how some people might view this process of cultural assimilation as a mortal threat? As something worth fighting agai nst? Was a clash of civilizations inevitable? Amazingly, the U.S . military engaged in more crisis-response activity around the wo rld in the 1990s than in any previous decade of the Cold War, yet no national vision arose to explain our expanding role. Globaliz ation seemed to be remaking the world, but meanwhile the U.S. mil itary seemed to be doing nothing more than babysitting chronic se curity situations on the margin. Inside the Pentagon, these crisi s responses were exclusively filed under the new rubric military operations other than war, as if to signify their lack of strateg ic meaning. The Defense Department spent the 1990s ignoring its o wn workload, preferring to plot out its future transformation for future wars against future opponents. America was not a global c op, but at best a global fireman pointing his hose at whichever b laze seemed most eye-catching at the moment. We were not trying t o make the world safe for anything; we just worked to keep these nasty little blazes under control. America was hurtling forward w ithout looking forward. In nautical terms, we were steering by ou r wake. Yet a pattern did emerge with each American crisis respo nse in the 1990s. These deployments turned out to be overwhelming ly concentrated in the regions of the world that were effectively excluded from globalization's Functioning Core-namely, the Carib bean Rim, Africa, the Balkans, the Caucasus, Central Asia, the Mi ddle East and Southwest Asia, and much of Southeast Asia. These r egions constitute globalization's ozone hole, or what I call its Non-Integrating Gap, where connectivity remains thin or absent. S imply put, if a country was losing out to globalization or reject ing much of its cultural content flows, there was a far greater c hance that the United States would end up sending troops there at some point across the 1990s. But because the Pentagon viewed all these situations as lesser includeds, there was virtually no reb alancing of the U.S. military to reflect the increased load. We k new we ne, Putnam Adult, 2004, 2.5, Golgonooza Press. Very Good/Very Good. 2007. First Edition. Hard Cover. 12 Mo 20.8 x 13.5 x 2 cm 3540729445 Dust jacket complete, unclipped. Original cloth boards with bright gilt titling on spine. No ownership marks. 150 pages clean and tight. ERIC GILL (1882-1940) is well known as a sculptor, wood and stone carver, letterer, engraver, typeface designer and graphic artist. But he was also a radical religious and social philosopher - a Christian revolutionary - for whom `life was more than art', because it was the highest art, the art of being human. Thus his interests were never theoretical and his view of life was holistic, involving the whole person in a unity of art, work and spiritual values. A convert to Catholicism in 1913, Gill brought to the movement of social and aesthetic renewal founded by Ruskin and William Morris a sensibility sharpened both by Non-conformism and by the enthusiastic acceptance of Thomism. After World War I, Gill helped create the Ditchling Guild, an independent society of Roman Catholics bound together by common faith and common ideas about work and human society. In 1924, Gill moved with his family and a few friends, now living under the rule of third-order Dominicans, to Capel-y-ffin, in South Wales. Here the task of integrating human work and religious life in a craft community continued, and here, too, Gill began to write, at first short pieces, then longer essays. In 1928, he moved back to Buckinghamshire, where he lived until his death. A HOLY TRADITION OF WORKING is an anthology drawn from the full prophetic range of Gill's concerns. The topics covered include: First Things; What is Man?; What is Art?; The Four Causes; Of Work and Responsibility; Of Beauty; Of Imagination; Property, Ownership and Holy Poverty; and A Vision of Normal Society. Brian Keeble writes `There can be no mistaking the directional impulse in Gill's thought; it is heavenward. Not so much a heaven "up there" as one with a more local habitation; the kingdom of heaven within which is the kingdom proper to man, that is, man the maker, one who is uniquely fitted, being created in His image, to "collaborate with God"...' ., Golgonooza Press, 2007, 3<