“I’m going to start wrapping this up. I’m going to make an argument about how we interact or transact with the outside world.
The United States is a mere 5% of the world’s population. 95% over there. Somehow we manage to expel a quarter of the world’s pollution and garbage on the planet. Somehow we manage to burn a quarter of the world’s energy. 5% of the world’s population. I call that living large.
My friend’s [sic] on Wall Street say this is perfectly fair. We generate a quarter of the world’s wealth. Another way to look at it. Economic footprint. We are experts at exporting our sovereign debt. We do it better than anybody in the world. It allows us to live beyond our means. Of course, if you took $350 billion dollars out of the U.S. federal budget and stop paying for security around the planet, you’d have a different economy I would argue and a different world unfortunately. My friends on Wall Street say, why do you bring this up in public? Do you know what it costs to print those little pieces of paper we send around the world? Nothing. They are just promises. What we get in return computers, cars, it’s tremendous deal. I think the real transaction is that we export security and we import connectivity. Global stability is a COLLECTIVE good. Why do we pay more for it than anybody else? Because we enjoy it more than anybody else. So how I view those major flows as transactions. We’ve got to let their youth in. We’ve got to give them opportunity cause we are going to age. That is an essential transaction that we have to pursue. You put in the Patriot Act, you divert the flow of Latinos coming to the United States that are supposed to account for ⅔ of our population growth between now and 2050 and you’re changing human history because they are going to the Iberian peninsula now – in Europe because they feel more welcome there in far larger numbers than we anticipated since 9/11. Unanticipated consequence. We’re exchanging our security for their instability. So we are going to firewall ourselves from some of the worst things inside the gap. You can’t grow the core unless you protect the core. Their energy matters to us – even if it is in an extended fashion. The price of energy goes up in China, the price of goods goes up in Walmart. That’s how it works. With our money, we exchange for their development and we buy off the only long term threat that really matters – China.”
- Thomas Barnett