Invasion of Iraq when he wrote an article for Esquire in support of the military action entitled "The Pentagon's New Map" (which would later become the title of a book that would elaborate on his geopolitical theories).

He received his MA in regional studies: Russia, Eastern Europe and Central Asia and his PhD in political science from Harvard University.

At the Naval War College, Barnett served as director of the New Rule Sets Project an effort designed to explore how the spread of globalization alters the basic "rules of the road" in the international security environment, with special reference to how these changes redefine the U.S. military's historic role as "security enabler" of America's commercial network ties with the world.

After the offices of Cantor Fitzgerald and its carbon credit brokerage subsidiary CantorCO2e were destroyed at One World Trade Center on 9/11/2001, Barnett described the event as the "first live-broadcast, mass snuff film in human history.

"[5] Following the September 11, 2001 attacks, from October 2001 to June 2003, Barnett worked as the Assistant for Strategic Futures in the Office of Force Transformation in the Department of Defense under the direction of the late Vice Admiral (ret).

the senior managing director of Enterra Solutions, a contributing editor for Esquire magazine, and a distinguished scholar and author at the Howard H. Baker, Jr. Center for Public Policy at the University of Tennessee.

Barnett had grown up with the expectation that the United States and the Soviet Union would remain in the Cold War standoff indefinitely, and had followed an education path that would have been useful for that context.

However, shortly after he completed his education and started to work in the public and private sectors, the Soviet Union collapsed, leaving America as the world's sole superpower.

[citation needed] The NewRuleSets.Project was one of many programs that the United States military has launched since the fall of the Soviet Union in order to determine what threats will emerge in the coming decades.

Once the Soviets lost control, the country went through a "rule set reset," organizing itself to more closely align with the largely democratic and capitalist societies it had once opposed.

The group also noticed that globalization has caused a fairly common rule set to be shared between a great many countries around the world.

[citation needed] Another interesting thing to note was that, of U.S. military deployments around the world since 1990, virtually all have taken place in countries that do not meet that level of income.