AMERICA’S NEW MAP | THOMAS P.M. BARNETT

About the book:

Three tectonic and inevitable shifts have left the world at a crossroads. North America is poised to either re-emerge as a global leader, or turn back in time, ceding power and influence to competitors.

The 21st century unleashed unprecedented changes across the globe—to its climate, to the demographic makeup of its nations, and to the very nature of allegiance in the digital age. With its global influence waning, America must reevaluate its approach to globalization if it wishes to remain a leader.

In America’s New Map: Restoring Global Leadership in an Era of Climate Change and Demographic Collapse, Thomas P.M. Barnett, bestselling author of The Pentagon’s New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century and acclaimed geo-strategist, offers seven throughlines to frame and redefine the ambitions and posture of these United States, setting our Union on a bold-but-entirely-familiar national trajectory.

In these pages, Barnett offers a deep, yet accessible dive into the three shifts that have lead us to this point:

• As climate change ravages countries closest to the equator, global dynamics are shifting from an East-West emphasis to North-South in the greatest geopolitical transformation our world has yet experienced—and the Western Hemisphere is far better positioned to exploit this radical reorientation than the East.

• Aging demographics worldwide favor more slowly aging nations, including the US, while challenging rapidly aging nations like China, incentivizing countries best to delay that transition by integrating younger, faster-growing populations into their ranks.

• In combination, these two tectonic forces collide with a third: the exploding consumption of an expanding—and now majority—global middle class, the bulk of whom reside along the increasingly unstable North-South frontier.

Taking every variable of these unique circumstances into account, America’s New Map charts a path toward a bigger and better United States. We will all be living in somebody’s world come mid-century—this book tells Americans how to make sure it is one we can recognize as our own.

About the Author:

Dr. Thomas P.M. Barnett is a leading geopolitical strategist and bestselling author of The Pentagon’s New Map, and who has presented his worldview and strategic-planning concepts to universities, military commands and academies, government agencies and corporations across the financial, energy, agriculture, and defense industries.

Thomas has worked in U.S. national security circles since the end of the Cold War. He is known for his work at the United States Naval War College and at the Office of Force Transformation in the Department of Defense under the direction of the late Vice Admiral Arthur K. Cebrowski (U.S. Navy, Ret.) – known as the father of “network-centric warfare.”

An award-winning professor, Thomas has written for Esquire, Foreign Policy, Wired, National Review, and the Washington Post, and has been interviewed by Rolling Stone, Economist, Time, BBC World Service, CNN, Fox News, NPR, and many foreign media. Thomas has been described by U.S. News & World Report’s Michael Barone as “one of the most important strategic thinkers of our time.” A prime example is his TED Talk, which has received over 1.3 million online views.

After 9/11, Thomas joined Cebrowski’s new Office of Force Transformation in the Office of the Secretary of Defense as his Assistant for Strategic Futures. In that capacity, he developed an influential brief on globalization and international security, which later morphed into a New York Times-bestselling book, The Pentagon’s New Map (2004). Thomas extended his “New Map” series with the volumes Blueprint for Action (2005) and Great Powers (2009).

Upon leaving government service in 2005, Thomas worked for a series of technology start-ups exploring cognitive artificial intelligence, crowdsourced wargaming, and enterprise resilience. He worked for years as a journalist, both as a Contributing Editor at Esquire and a Scripps News syndicated columnist. Thomas was likewise a Visiting Strategist at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and later a Senior Research Fellow at the Beijing-based Knowfar Institute for Strategic & Defense Studies.

Thomas now serves as Principal Business Strategist at Throughline, Inc., where he is focused on scenario planning. His current work and thinking about the converging forces of geopolitical security, climate change, technology, supply chain, and America’s ability to lead are valued by the Throughline’s clients: including the U.S. national security community, major U.S. government agencies, multinational corporations, and non-profits.