New Orleans - a Chernobyl-like vision of the GAP in the Homeland

Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog

Tom Barnett places the Katrina disaster and its aftermath in the strategic matrix he has now established in the Pentagon's New Map and his soon-to-be released A BluePrint for Action.


With a Bush White House on its heels, expect the midlevel bureaucrats who really
run Washington to be largely in control through the remainder of the term, and
here the System Perturbation that is Katrina will likely prove Chernobyl-like in its
impact: spurring the system toward a profound rethinking of what security really
is in this increasingly interconnected world (the loss of the node that is N.O.
being the biggest horizontal scenario for the long haul, revealing as it does critical infrastructural weaknesses in our economy). Rebuilding the devastated coast willbe a lot like shrinking the Gap, because to create real resiliency there we'll end up creating lots of new infrastructure where we now realize there was none—or at
least not nearly enough.

This will not be a rebuilding, but a re-imagining—just like we need to do in the
Gap. And here I think the country will end up regretting giving Bush four more
years because—again—this crowd lacks imagination.

Still, it's not just the military's turn toward the SysAdmin function that's likely to be accelerated, we're likely to see a new empathetic resonance across previously
firewalled sectors, like urban renewal and foreign aid, overseas crisis response
and homeland security, and public versus private responsibilities for ensuring
social resilience.

And in this process, I really believe we'll get stronger, get smarter, and move this
pile. In getting a real dose of what the Gap feels like within our borders, we
should start noticing the larger picture, the larger challenges, and the larger
opportunities