THE POLITICAL EQUATOR ll Tracing an imaginary line along the US / México Border and extending it directly across a map of the world, what emerges is a political equator that roughly corresponds with the revised geography of the post-9/11 world according to Thomas P. M. Barnett’s scheme for The Pentagon’s New Map, in which he effectively divides the globe into “Functioning Core,” or parts of the world where “globalization is thick with network connectivity, financial transactions, liberal media flows, and collective security,” and “Non-Integrating Gap,” “regions plagued by politically repressive regimes, widespread poverty and disease, routine mass murder, and … chronic conflicts that incubate the next generation of global terrorists.”