REQUIREMENT 1: Summary of Author’s Thesis and Main Arguments [20 points]. Your answer should be approximately one typed page.

1. Summarize the author’s thesis and main arguments in your own words. Do NOT just copy and paste from the article.

I strongly believe that the author’s thesis is composed of two parts. First, the author divides the world in two distinct groups: the Functioning Core and the Non-Integrating Gap.
The Functioning Core is composed of those nation-states that are connected through communication networks, agreements and associations, financial transactions, and security. He states that these nations are successful and stable because they are actively participating in an international environment with common rules and regulations that are convenient to the group and have common interests related to their economics and political goals
The other point of view that the author describes is another group known as the Non-Integrating Gap (“Gap”) nations. The author finds that those nations that are not participating in globalization or participating in the international environment and are disconnected from the global community appeared to deal with oppressive political regimes, never-ending poverty and diseases, corruption, and are more susceptive to sponsor terrorism.

Another point that the author discusses is the fact that the United States must address the security hazard and small conflicts of those “Gap” nations currently posse to our nation and the members of the Functioning Core Nations. In other word the nations that belong to “the core” must promote those rogue nations “the Gap” to participate in the international arena in an effort to minimize the differences between the groups of nations and become active participants of international accords and security. second part of Barnett’s thesis is that the United States must promote connectivity with the Gap, in what he calls “shrinking the gap”, by exporting security conducive to globalization. Barnett believes that the United States must lead this effort because it is ideally suited to do so, as the United States is “connectivity personified” and has the military and economic strength to promote security. Barnett also believes that the United States’ military engagement in the Gap is the only way to protect it from national security threats found in the Gap.

Part 2. Author’s main arguments
Barnett begins the support of his thesis by mapping the current international...
Clearly MR Barnett to global terrorists.” Thomas P.M. Barnett, “The Pentagon’s New Map—It Explains Why We’re Going to War, and Why We’ll Keep Going to War,” Esquire (March 2003), 97. Barnett asserts that it is the disconnected nations of the Gap that pose a national security threat to the United States because these nations will eventually migrate their problems to those countries enjoying globalization's connectivity.

This "gap" thesis misses one critical element---that of religion or the absence of it. Virtually all of this "gap" zone is in Islamic hands, save parts of Africa and parts of Central America that the "liberation theology" Catholics convinced to be socialist.
What can we notice about his "gap?" It is overwhelmingly (again, Central Am. excepted) non-Christian. For years, Pat Robertson and others have called this the "10/40 window," which is full of (from a Christian perspective) idolatry, heathenism, voodoo, witch doctors, Hinduism and Islam. The issue is not whether they are "disconnected" but rather connected to what? Connected to Whom?
One reason for the poverty is the absence of Christianity, especially the "Protestant ethic" of hard work, saving for the future, secure contracts, combined with the Western (mostly Christian) emphasis on respecting legal/state authority because it is "given by God."
Please, this is not meant to start a big battle over Protestant/Christian theology, but rather to point out that "disconnectedness" has its roots in something OTHER than money and mammon.
From that perspective, then, the authors are still dealing with symptoms, which is all any secular government can deal with. Given that, what is the best response? Protect American interests, narrowly defined and Constitutionally limited. I don't think that involves massive foreign aid (but am not opposed to STRATEGIC foreign aid needed to "buy" temporary loyalty); nor do I think it involves permanent U.S. troops in places like Korea or Germany.