I highly recommend that you download and listen to this podcast with Professor Thomas Barnett of the Center for Naval Warfare Studies at the U.S. Naval War College. It’s nearly an hour long but worth every minute.

Barnett talks about global politics in the context of technology. He points to one of the most dramatic developments of the last 15 years: the reordering of global priorities from superpower confrontation to containment of individual madmen and the opportunity it presents for the U.S. economic and political model to become transcendent.

Barnett, who’s written two influential books on the changing nature of global politics, notes that the issues facing governments and economies have changed dramatically in just a short time. As late as the mid ’80s, the threat of nuclear annihalation was a very real force in our day-to-day lives. The end of the cold war erased that threat and refocused our attention on state-to-state conflict as epitomized by the war between Serbia and Croatia. But that threat has vanished, too, he argues. The only major major inter-state conflict in the world today is between Ethiopia and Eritrea. Today, the political priority has turned to containing madmen like Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden, who disrupt global stability through targeted attacks but who don’t threaten the supremacy of market economies. This is an important and very positive change.

Barnett argues that the U.S. economic model has won and that means the political model is winning as well. About 2/3 of the world’s population lives in countries that have bought into capitalism and these countries will be tied closely to the U.S. in the future. In fact, he suggests that Americans may actually have more in common with China and India than we do with Great Britain and France because those Asian countries are embracing free market economies over government protectionism. Opposition is weakening. The Taliban promises a return to the past, which is unappealing to most people. These dissonant forces will fade with time as the superiority of the global free trade model triumphs.

Where’s the tech angle? Not where you’d expect. Barnett believes that Y2K was a watershed in global politics. The date-change phenomenon created a heightened sensitivity that global networks could be disrupted and global commerce compromised, he says. Whether Y2K was a real problem or not is almost unimportant. The fact is that it forced people to confront the possibility of a world without computer networks and that created awareness of the importance of connectedness to the global economy. That awareness convinced people that maintaining supply chains and business linkages between countries was vital their well-being. And that undermind the power of local dicators.

Barnett uses terms like “open source” and “operating system” to describe characteristics of the global economy. If you’re a techie who wants to understand the value of your work on a macro level, I recommend listening to this podcast.