CHAPTER 9
EVERY AGE HAS ITS LEITMOTIF, a set of beliefs that explains the universe, that inspires or consoles the individual by providing an explanation for the multiplicity of events impinging on him. In the medieval period, it was religion; in the Enlightenment, it was Reason; in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it was nationalism combined with a view of history as a motivating force. Science and technology are the governing concepts of our age. They have brought about advances in human well-being unprecedented in history. Their evolution transcends traditional cultural constraints. Yet they have also produced weapons capable of destroying mankind. Technology has brought about a means of communication permitting instantaneous contact between individuals or institutions in every part of the globe as well as the storage and retrieval of vast quantities of information at the touch of a button. Yet by what purposes is this technology informed? What happens to international order if technology has become such a part of everyday life that it defines its own universe as the sole relevant one? Is the destructiveness of modern weapons technology so vast that a common fear may unite mankind in order to eliminate the scourge of war? Or will possession of these weapons create a permanent foreboding? Will the rapidity and scope of communication break down barriers between societies and individuals and provide transparency of such magnitude that the age-old dreams of a human community will come into being? Or will the opposite happen: Will mankind, amidst weapons of mass destruction, networked transparency, and the absence of privacy, propel itself into a world without limits or order, careening through crises without comprehending them?
The author claims no competence in the more advanced forms of technology; his concern is with its implications.
WORLD ORDER IN THE NUCLEAR AGE
Since history began to be recorded, political units—whether described as states or not—had at their disposal war as the ultimate recourse. Yet the technology that made war possible also limited its scope. The most powerful and well-equipped states could only project force over limited distances, in certain quantities, and against so many targets. Ambitious leaders were constrained, both by convention and by the state of communications technology. Radical courses of action were inhibited by the pace at which they unfolded. Diplomatic instructions were obliged to take into account contingencies that might occur in the time in which a message could make a round trip. This imposed a built-in pause for reflection and acknowledged a distinction between what leaders could and could not control.
Whether a balance of power between states operated as a formal principle or was simply practiced without theoretical elaboration, equilibrium of some kind was an essential component of any international order—either at the periphery, as with the Roman and Chinese empires, or as a core operating principle, as in Europe.
With the Industrial Revolution, the pace of change quickened, and the power projected by modern militaries grew more devastating. When the technological gap was great, even rudimentary technology—by present standards—could be genocidal in effect. European technology and European diseases did much to wipe out existing civilizations in the Americas. With the promise of new efficiencies came new potentials for destruction, as the impact of mass conscription multiplied the compounding effect of technology.
The advent of nuclear weapons brought this process to a culmination. In World War II, scientists from the major powers labored to achieve mastery of the atom and with it the ability to release its energy. The American effort, known as the Manhattan Project and drawing on the best minds from the United States, Britain, and the European diaspora, prevailed. After the first successful atomic test in July 1945 in the deserts of New Mexico, J. Robert Oppenheimer, the theoretical physicist who headed the secret weapons-development effort, awed by his triumph, recalled a verse from the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
In earlier periods, wars had an implicit calculus: the benefits of victory outweighed its cost, and the weaker fought to impose such costs on the stronger as to disturb this equation. Alliances were formed to augment power, to leave no doubt about the alignment of forces, to define the casus belli (insofar as the removal of doubt about ultimate intentions is possible in a society of sovereign states). The penalties of military conflict were considered less than the penalties of defeat. By contrast, the nuclear age based itself on a weapon whose use would impose costs out of proportion to any conceivable benefit.
The nuclear age posed the dilemma of how to bring the destructiveness of modern weapons into some moral or political relationship with the objectives that were being pursued. Prospects for any kind of international order—indeed, for human survival—now urgently required the amelioration, if not elimination, of major-power conflict. A theoretical limit was sought—short of the point of either superpower using the entirety of its military capabilities.
Strategic stability was defined as a balance in which neither side would use its weapons of mass destruction because the adversary was always able to inflict an unacceptable level of destruction in retaliation. In a series of seminars at Harvard, Caltech, MIT, and the Rand Corporation among others in the 1950s and 1960s, a doctrine of “limited use” explored confining nuclear weapons to the battlefield or to military targets. All such theoretical efforts failed; whatever limits were imagined, once the threshold to nuclear warfare was crossed, modern technology overrode observable limits and always enabled the adversary to escalate. Ultimately, strategists on both sides coalesced, at least tacitly, on the concept of a mutual assured destruction as the mechanism of nuclear peace. Based on the premise that both sides possessed a nuclear arsenal capable of surviving an initial assault, the objective was to counterbalance threats sufficiently terrifying that neither side would conceive of actually invoking them.
By the end of the 1960s, the prevailing strategic doctrine of each superpower relied on the ability to inflict an “unacceptable” level of damage on the presumed adversary. What the adversary would consider unacceptable was, of course, unknowable; nor was this judgment communicated.
A surreal quality haunted this calculus of deterrence, which relied on “logical” equations of scenarios positing a level of the casualties exceeding that suffered in four years of world wars and occurring in a matter of days or hours. Because there was no prior experience with the weapons underpinning these threats, deterrence depended in large part on the ability to affect the adversary psychologically. When, in the 1950s, Mao spoke of China’s willingness to accept sacrifices of hundreds of millions in a nuclear war, it was widely treated in the West as a symptom of emotional or ideological derangement. It was, in fact, probably the consequence of a sober calculation that to withstand military capacities beyond previous human experience, a country needed to demonstrate a willingness to sacrifice beyond human comprehension. In any case, the shock in Western and Warsaw Pact capitals at these statements ignored that the superpowers’ own concepts of deterrence rested on apocalyptic risks. Even if more urbanely expressed, the doctrine of mutual assured destruction relied on the proposition that leaders were acting in the interest of peace by deliberately exposing their civilian populations to the threat of annihilation.
Many efforts were undertaken to avoid the dilemma of possessing a huge arsenal that could not be used and whose use could not even plausibly be threatened. Complicated war scenarios were devised. But neither side, to the best of my knowledge—and for some of this period I was in a position to know—ever approached the point of actually using nuclear weapons in a specific crisis between the two superpowers. Except for the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, when a Soviet combat division was initially authorized to use its nuclear weapons to defend itself, neither side approached their use, either against each other or in wars against non-nuclear third countries.
In this manner, the most fearsome weapons, commanding large shares of each superpower’s defense budget, lost their relevance to the actual crises facing leaders. Mutual suicide became the mechanism of international order. When, during the Cold War, the two sides, Washington and Moscow, challenged each other, it was through proxy wars. At the pinnacle of the nuclear era, it was conventional forces that assumed pivotal importance. The military struggles of the time were taking place on the far-flung periphery—Inchon, the Mekong River delta, Luanda, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The measure of success was effectiveness in supporting local allies in the developing world. In short, the strategic arsenals of the major powers, incommensurable with conceivable political objectives, created an illusion of omnipotence belied by the actual evolution of events.
It was in this context that in 1969 President Nixon started formal talks with the Soviets on the limitation of strategic arms (with the acronym SALT). They resulted in a 1972 agreement that established a ceiling for the offensive buildup and limited each superpower’s antiballistic missile sites to one (in effect turning them into training sites because a full ABM deployment for the United States under an original Nixon proposal in 1969 would have required twelve sites). The reasoning was that since the U.S. Congress refused to approbate missile defense beyond two sites, deterrence needed to be based on mutual assured destruction. For that strategy, the offensive nuclear weapons on each side were sufficient—in fact, more than sufficient—to produce an unacceptable level of casualties. The absence of missile defense would remove any uncertainty from that calculation, guaranteeing mutual deterrence—but also the destruction of the society, should deterrence fail.
At the Reykjavík summit in 1986, Reagan reversed the mutual assured destruction approach. He proposed the abolition of all offensive weapons by both sides and the scrapping of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, thereby allowing a defensive system. His intent was to do away with the concept of mutual assured destruction by proscribing offensive systems and keeping defense systems as a hedge against violations. But Gorbachev, believing—mistakenly—that the U.S. missile defense program was well under way while the Soviet Union, lacking an equivalent technological-economic base, could not keep up, insisted on maintaining the ABM Treaty. The Soviets in effect gave up the race in strategic weapons three years later, ending the Cold War.
Since then, the number of strategic nuclear offensive warheads has been reduced, first under President George W. Bush and then under President Obama, by agreement with Russia to about fifteen hundred warheads for each side—approximately 10 percent of the number of warheads that existed at the high point of the mutual assured destruction strategy. (The reduced number is more than enough to implement a mutual assured destruction strategy.)
The nuclear balance has produced a paradoxical impact on the international order. The historic balance of power had facilitated the Western domination of the then-colonial world; by contrast, the nuclear order—the West’s own creation—had the opposite effect. The margin of military superiority of advanced countries over the developing countries has been incomparably larger than at any previous period in history. But because so much of their military effort has been devoted to nuclear weapons, whose use in anything but the gravest crisis was implicitly discounted, regional powers could redress the overall military balance by a strategy geared to prolonging any war beyond the willingness of the “advanced” country’s public to sustain it—as France experienced in Algeria and Vietnam; the United States in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan; and the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. (All except Korea resulted in, in effect, a unilateral withdrawal by the formally much stronger power after protracted conflict with conventional forces.) Asymmetric warfare operated in the interstices of traditional doctrines of linear operations against an enemy’s territory. Guerrilla forces, which defend no territory, could concentrate on inflicting casualties and eroding the public’s political will to continue the conflict. In this sense, technological supremacy turned into geopolitical impotence.
THE CHALLENGE OF NUCLEAR PROLIFERATION
With the end of the Cold War, the threat of nuclear war between the existing nuclear superpowers has essentially disappeared. But the spread of technology—especially the technology to produce peaceful nuclear energy—has vastly increased the feasibility of acquiring a nuclear-weapons capability. The sharpening of ideological dividing lines and the persistence of unresolved regional conflicts have magnified the incentives to acquire nuclear weapons, including for rogue states or non-state actors. The calculations of mutual insecurity that produced restraint during the Cold War do not apply with anything like the same degree—if at all—to the new entrants in the nuclear field, and even less so to the non-state actors. Proliferation of nuclear weapons has become an overarching strategic problem for the contemporary international order.
In response to these perils, the United States, the Soviet Union, and the United Kingdom negotiated a Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT) and opened it for signature in 1968. It proposed to prevent any further spread of nuclear weapons (the United States, the U.S.S.R., and the U.K. signed in 1968, and France and China signed in 1992). Non-nuclear-weapons states were to be given assistance by the nuclear states in the peaceful utilization of nuclear technology provided they accepted safeguards to guarantee their nuclear programs remained purely nonmilitary endeavors. At this writing, there are 189 signatories of the nonproliferation agreement.
Yet the global nonproliferation regime has had difficulty embedding itself as a true international norm. Assailed by some as a form of “nuclear apartheid” and treated by many states as a rich-country fixation, the NPT’s restrictions have often functioned as a set of aspirations that countries must be cajoled to implement rather than as a binding legal obligation. Illicit progress toward nuclear weapons has proved difficult to discover and resist, for its initial steps are identical with the development of peaceful uses of nuclear energy specifically authorized by the NPT. The treaty proscribed but did not prevent signatories such as Libya, Syria, Iraq, and Iran from maintaining covert nuclear programs in violation of NPT safeguards or, in the case of North Korea, withdrawing from the NPT in 2003 and testing and proliferating nuclear technology without international control.
Where a state has violated or repudiated the terms of the NPT, hovered on the edge of compliance, or simply declined to recognize the legitimacy of nonproliferation as an international norm, there exists no defined international mechanism for enforcing it. So far preemptive action has been taken by the United States only against Iraq—a contributing motive for the war against Saddam Hussein—and by Israel against Iraq and Syria; the Soviet Union considered it against China in the 1960s, though ultimately refrained.
The nonproliferation regime has scored a few significant successes in bringing about the negotiated dismantlement of nuclear programs. South Africa, Brazil, Argentina, and several “post-Soviet” republics have abandoned nuclear weapons programs that had either come to fruition or made significant technical progress. At the same time, since the end of the American monopoly in 1949, nuclear weapons have been acquired by the Soviet Union/Russia, Britain, France, Israel, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea, and at a threshold level by Iran. Moreover, Pakistan and North Korea have proliferated their nuclear know-how widely.
Proliferation has had an impact on the nuclear equilibrium in a differential way, depending on the perceived willingness of the new nuclear country to use its weapons. British and French nuclear capabilities add to the NATO arsenal only marginally. They are conceived primarily as a last resort, as a safety net in case of abandonment by the United States, if some major power were to threaten British and French perceptions of their basic national interest, or as a means to stay apart from a nuclear war between superpowers—all essentially remote contingencies. The Indian and Pakistani nuclear establishments are, in the first instance, directed against each other, affecting the strategic equilibrium in two ways. The risks of escalation may reduce the likelihood of full-scale conventional war on the subcontinent. But because the weapon systems are so vulnerable and technically so difficult to protect against short-range attack, the temptation for preemption is inherent in the technology, especially in situations when emotions are already running high. In short, proliferation generates the classic nuclear dilemma: even when nuclear weapons reduce the likelihood of war, they would gigantically magnify its ferocity were war to occur.
India’s nuclear relations with China are likely to approximate the deterrent posture that existed between the adversaries in the Cold War; that is, they will tend toward preventing their use. Pakistan’s nuclear establishment impinges on wider regional and global issues. Abutting the Middle East and with a significant domestic Islamist presence at home, Pakistan has occasionally hinted at the role of nuclear protector or of nuclear armorer. The impact of the proliferation of nuclear weapons to Iran would compound all these issues—as discussed in Chapter 4.
Over time, the continued proliferation of nuclear weapons will affect even the overall nuclear balance between the nuclear superpowers. Leaders of the established nuclear powers are obliged to prepare for the worst contingency. This involves the possibility of nuclear threats posed not only by the other superpower but also by proliferating countries. Their arsenals will reflect the conviction that they need, beyond deterrence of the principal potential adversary, a residual force to cope with the proliferated part of the rest of the world. If each major nuclear power calculates in this manner, proliferation will impel a proportional increase in these residual forces, straining or exceeding existing limits. Further, these overlapping nuclear balances will grow more complicated as proliferation proceeds. The relatively stable nuclear order of the Cold War will be superseded by an international order in which projection by a state possessing nuclear weapons of an image of a willingness to take apocalyptic decisions may offer it a perverse advantage over rivals.
To provide themselves a safety net against nuclear superpowers, even countries with nuclear capabilities have an incentive to nestle under the tacit or overt support of a superpower (examples are Israel, the European nuclear forces, Japan with its threshold nuclear capability, other proliferating or near-proliferating states in the Middle East). So it may transpire that the proliferation of weapons will lead to alliance systems comparable in their rigidity to the alliances that led to World War I, though far exceeding them in global reach and destructive power.
A particularly serious imbalance may arise if a proliferated country approaches the military offensive capability of the two nuclear superpowers (a task which for both China and India seems attainable). Any major nuclear country, if it succeeds in staying out of a nuclear conflict between the others, would emerge as potentially dominant. In a multipolar nuclear world, that too could occur if such a country aligns with one of the superpowers because the combined forces might then have a strategic advantage. The rough nuclear balance that exists between current superpowers may then tilt away from strategic stability; the lower the agreed level of offensive forces between Russia and the United States, the more this will be true.
Any further spread of nuclear weapons multiplies the possibilities of nuclear confrontation; it magnifies the danger of diversion, deliberate or unauthorized. It will eventually affect the balance between nuclear superpowers. And as the development of nuclear weapons spreads into Iran and continues in North Korea—in defiance of all ongoing negotiations—the incentives for other countries to follow the same path could become overwhelming.
In the face of these trends, the United States needs to constantly review its own technology. During the Cold War, nuclear technology was broadly recognized as the forefront of American scientific achievements—a frontier of knowledge then posing the most important and strategic challenges. Now the best technical minds are encouraged to devote efforts instead to projects seen as more publicly relevant. Perhaps partly as a result, inhibitions on the elaboration of nuclear technology are treated as inexorable even as proliferating countries arm and other countries enhance their technology. The United States must remain at the frontier of nuclear technology, even while it negotiates about restraint in its use.
From the perspective of the past half century’s absence of a major-power conflict, it could be argued that nuclear weapons have made the world less prone to war. But the decrease in the number of wars has been accompanied by a vast increase in violence carried out by non-state groups or by states under some label other than war. A combination of extraordinary risk and ideological radicalism has opened up the possibilities for asymmetric war and for challenges by non-state groups that undermine long-term restraint.
Perhaps the most important challenge to the established nuclear powers is for them to determine their reaction if nuclear weapons were actually used by proliferating countries against each other. First, what must be done to prevent the use of nuclear weapons beyond existing agreements? If they should nonetheless be used, what immediate steps must be taken to stop such a war? How can the human and social damage be addressed? What can be done to prevent retaliatory escalation while still upholding the validity of deterrence and imposing appropriate consequences should deterrence fail? The march of technological progress must not obscure the fearsomeness of the capabilities humanity has invented and the relative fragility of the balances restraining their use. Nuclear weapons must not be permitted to turn into conventional arms. At that juncture, international order will require an understanding between the existing major nuclear countries to insist on nonproliferation, or order will be imposed by the calamities of nuclear war.
CYBER TECHNOLOGY AND WORLD ORDER
For most of history, technological change unfolded over decades and centuries of incremental advances that refined and combined existing technologies. Even radical innovations could over time be fitted within previous tactical and strategic doctrines: tanks were considered in terms of precedents drawn from centuries of cavalry warfare; airplanes could be conceptualized as another form of artillery, battleships as mobile forts, and aircraft carriers as airstrips. For all their magnification of destructive power, even nuclear weapons are in some respects an extrapolation from previous experience.
What is new in the present era is the rate of change of computing power and the expansion of information technology into every sphere of existence. Reflecting in the 1960s on his experiences as an engineer at the Intel Corporation, Gordon Moore concluded that the trend he had observed would continue at regular intervals to double the capacity of computer processing units every two years. “Moore’s Law” has proved astoundingly prophetic. Computers have shrunk in size, declined in cost, and grown exponentially faster to the point where advanced computer processing units can now be embedded in almost any object—phones, watches, cars, home appliances, weapons systems, unmanned aircraft, and the human body itself.
The revolution in computing is the first to bring so many individuals and processes into the same medium of communication and to translate and track their actions in a single technological language. Cyberspace—a word coined, at that point as an essentially hypothetical concept, only in the 1980s—has colonized physical space and, at least in major urban centers, is beginning to merge with it. Communication across it, and between its exponentially proliferating nodes, is near instantaneous. As tasks that were primarily manual or paper based a generation ago—reading, shopping, education, friendship, industrial and scientific research, political campaigns, finance, government record keeping, surveillance, military strategy—are filtered through the computing realm, human activity becomes increasingly “datafied” and part of a single “quantifiable, analyzable” system.
This is all the more so as, with the number of devices connected to the Internet now roughly ten billion and projected to rise to fifty billion by 2020, an “Internet of Things” or an “Internet of Everything” looms. Innovators now forecast a world of ubiquitous computing, with miniature data-processing devices embedded in everyday objects—“smart door locks, toothbrushes, wristwatches, fitness trackers, smoke detectors, surveillance cameras, ovens, toys and robots”—or floating through the air, surveying and shaping their environment in the form of “smart dust.” Each object is to be connected to the Internet and programmed to communicate with a central server or other networked devices.
The revolution’s effects extend to every level of human organization. Individuals wielding smartphones (and currently an estimated one billion people do) now possess information and analytical capabilities beyond the range of many intelligence agencies a generation ago. Corporations aggregating and monitoring the data exchanged by these individuals wield powers of influence and surveillance exceeding those of many contemporary states and of even more traditional powers. And governments, wary of ceding the new field to rivals, are propelled outward into a cyber realm with as yet few guidelines or restraints. As with any technological innovation, the temptation will be to see this new realm as a field for strategic advantage.
These changes have occurred so rapidly as to outstrip most attempts by those without technological expertise to comprehend their broader consequences. They draw humanity into regions hitherto unexplained, indeed unconceived. As a result, many of the most revolutionary technologies and techniques are currently limited in their use only by the capability and the discretion of the most technologically advanced.
No government, even the most totalitarian, has been able to arrest the flow or to resist the trend to push ever more of its operations into the digital domain. Most of the democracies have an ingrained instinct that an attempt to curtail the effects of an information revolution would be impossible and perhaps also immoral. Most of the countries outside the liberal-democratic world have set aside attempts to shut out these changes and turned instead to mastering them. Every country, company, and individual is now being enlisted in the technological revolution as either a subject or an object. What matters for the purpose of this book is the effect on prospects for international order.
The contemporary world inherits the legacy of nuclear weapons capable of destroying civilized life. But as catastrophic as their implications were, their significance and use could still be analyzed in terms of separable cycles of war and peace. The new technology of the Internet opens up entirely new vistas. Cyberspace challenges all historical experience. It is ubiquitous but not threatening in itself; its menace depends on its use. The threats emerging from cyberspace are nebulous and undefined and may be difficult to attribute. The pervasiveness of networked communications in the social, financial, industrial, and military sectors has vast beneficial aspects; it has also revolutionized vulnerabilities. Outpacing most rules and regulations (and indeed the technical comprehension of many regulators), it has, in some respects, created the state of nature about which philosophers have speculated and the escape from which, according to Hobbes, provided the motivating force for creating a political order.
Before the cyber age, nations’ capabilities could still be assessed through an amalgam of manpower, equipment, geography, economics, and morale. There was a clear distinction between periods of peace and war. Hostilities were triggered by defined events and carried out with strategies for which some intelligible doctrine had been formulated. Intelligence services played a role mainly in assessing, and occasionally in disrupting, adversaries’ capabilities; their activities were limited by implicit common standards of conduct or, at a minimum, by common experiences evolved over decades.
Internet technology has outstripped strategy or doctrine—at least for the time being. In the new era, capabilities exist for which there is as yet no common interpretation—or even understanding. Few if any limits exist among those wielding them to define either explicit or tacit restraints. When individuals of ambiguous affiliation are capable of undertaking actions of increasing ambition and intrusiveness, the very definition of state authority may turn ambiguous. The complexity is compounded by the fact that it is easier to mount cyberattacks than to defend against them, possibly encouraging an offensive bias in the construction of new capabilities.
The danger is compounded by the plausible deniability of those suspected of such actions and by the lack of international agreements for which, even if reached, there is no present system of enforcement. A laptop can produce global consequences. A solitary actor with enough computing power is able to access the cyber domain to disable and potentially destroy critical infrastructure from a position of near-complete anonymity. Electric grids could be surged and power plants disabled through actions undertaken exclusively outside a nation’s physical territory (or at least its territory as traditionally conceived). Already, an underground hacker syndicate has proved capable of penetrating government networks and disseminating classified information on a scale sufficient to affect diplomatic conduct. Stuxnet, an example of a state-backed cyberattack, succeeded in disrupting and delaying Iranian nuclear efforts, by some accounts to an extent rivaling the effects of a limited military strike. The botnet attack from Russia on Estonia in 2007 paralyzed communications for days.
Such a state of affairs, even if temporarily advantageous to the advanced countries, cannot continue indefinitely. The road to a world order may be long and uncertain, but no meaningful progress can be made if one of the most pervasive elements of international life is excluded from serious dialogue. It is highly improbable that all parties, especially those shaped by different cultural traditions, will arrive independently at the same conclusions about the nature and permissible uses of their new intrusive capacities. Some attempt at charting a common perception of our new condition is essential. In its absence, the parties will continue to operate on the basis of separate intuitions, magnifying the prospects of a chaotic outcome. For actions undertaken in the virtual, networked world are capable of generating pressures for countermeasures in physical reality, especially when they have the potential to inflict damage of a nature previously associated with armed attack. Absent some articulation of limits and agreement on mutual rules of restraint, a crisis situation is likely to arise, even unintentionally; the very concept of international order may be subject to mounting strains.
In other categories of strategic capabilities, governments have come to recognize the self-defeating nature of unconstrained national conduct. The more sustainable course is to pursue, even among potential adversaries, a mixture of deterrence and mutual restraint, coupled with measures to prevent a crisis arising from misinterpretation or miscommunication.
Cyberspace has become strategically indispensable. At this writing, users, whether individuals, corporations, or states, rely on their own judgment in conducting their activities. The Commander of U.S. Cyber Command has predicted that “the next war will beginin cyberspace.” It will not be possible to conceive of international order when the region through which states’ survival and progress are taking place remains without any international standards of conduct and is left to unilateral decisions.
The history of warfare shows that every technological offensive capability will eventually be matched and offset by defensive measures, although not every country will be equally able to afford them. Does this mean that technologically less advanced countries must shelter under the protection of high-tech societies? Is the outcome to be a plethora of tense power balances? Deterrence, which, in the case of nuclear weapons, took the form of balancing destructive powers, cannot be applied by direct analogy, because the biggest danger is an attack without warning that may not reveal itself until the threat has already been implemented.
Nor is it possible to base deterrence in cyberspace on symmetrical retaliation, as is the case with nuclear weapons. If a cyberattack is limited to a particular function or extent, a “response in kind” may have totally different implications for the United States and for the aggressor. For example, if the financial architecture of a major industrialized economy is undermined, is the victim entitled only to counterattack against the potentially negligible comparable assets of its attacker? Or only against the computers engaged in the attack? Because neither of these is likely to be a sufficient deterrent, the question then turns to whether “virtual” aggression warrants “kinetic” force in response—and to what degree and by what equations of equivalence. A new world of deterrence theory and strategic doctrine now in its infancy requires urgent elaboration.
In the end, a framework for organizing the global cyber environment will be imperative. It may not keep pace with the technology itself, but the process of defining it will serve to educate leaders of its dangers and the consequences. Even if agreements carry little weight in the event of a confrontation, they may at least prevent sliding into an irretrievable conflict produced by misunderstanding.
The dilemma of such technologies is that it is impossible to establish rules of conduct unless a common understanding of at least some of the key capabilities exists. But these are precisely the capabilities the major actors will be reluctant to disclose. The United States has appealed to China for restraint in purloining trade secrets via cyber intrusions, arguing that the scale of activity is unprecedented. Yet to what extent is the United States prepared to disclose its own cyber intelligence efforts?
In this manner, asymmetry and a kind of congenital world disorder are built into relations between cyber powers both in diplomacy and in strategy. The emphasis of many strategic rivalries is shifting from the physical to the information realm, in the collection and processing of data, the penetration of networks, and the manipulation of psychology. Absent articulation of some rules of international conduct, a crisis will arise from the inner dynamics of the system.
THE HUMAN FACTOR
From the opening of the modern era in the sixteenth century, political philosophers have debated the issue of the relationship of the human being to the circumstances in which he finds himself. Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau advanced a biological-psychological portrait of human consciousness and derived their political positions from this starting point. The American Founders, notably Madison in Federalist 10, did the same. They traced the evolution of society through factors that were “sown in the nature of man”: each individual’s powerful yet fallible faculty of reason and his inherent “self-love,” from the interaction of which “different opinions will be formed”; and humanity’s diversity of capabilities, from which “the possession of different degrees and kinds of property immediately results” and with them a “division of the society into different interests and parties.” Though these thinkers differed in their analyses of specific factors and in the conclusions they drew, all framed their concepts in terms of a humanity whose inherent nature and experience of reality were timeless and unchanging.
In the contemporary world, human consciousness is shaped through an unprecedented filter. Television, computers, and smartphones compose a trifecta offering nearly constant interaction with a screen throughout the day. Human interactions in the physical world are now pushed relentlessly into the virtual world of networked devices. Recent studies suggest that adult Americans spend on average roughly half of their waking hours in front of a screen, and the figure continues to grow.
What is the impact of this cultural upheaval on relations between states? The policymaker undertakes multiple tasks, many of them shaped by his society’s history and culture. He must first of all make an analysis of where his society finds itself. This is inherently where the past meets the future; therefore such a judgment cannot be made without an instinct for both of these elements. He must then try to understand where that trajectory will take him and his society. He must resist the temptation to identify policymaking with projecting the familiar into the future, for on that road lies stagnation and then decline. Increasingly in a time of technological and political upheaval, wisdom counsels that a different path must be chosen. By definition, in leading a society from where it is to where it has never been, a new course presents advantages and disadvantages that will always seem closely balanced. To undertake a journey on a road never before traveled requires character and courage: character because the choice is not obvious; courage because the road will be lonely at first. And the statesman must then inspire his people to persist in the endeavor. Great statesmen (Churchill, both Roosevelts, de Gaulle, and Adenauer) had these qualities of vision and determination; in today’s society, it is increasingly difficult to develop them.
For all the great and indispensable achievements the Internet has brought to our era, its emphasis is on the actual more than the contingent, on the factual rather than the conceptual, on values shaped by consensus rather than by introspection. Knowledge of history and geography is not essential for those who can evoke their data with the touch of a button. The mindset for walking lonely political paths may not be self-evident to those who seek confirmation by hundreds, sometimes thousands of friends on Facebook.
In the Internet age, world order has often been equated with the proposition that if people have the ability to freely know and exchange the world’s information, the natural human drive toward freedom will take root and fulfill itself, and history will run on autopilot, as it were. But philosophers and poets have long separated the mind’s purview into three components: information, knowledge, and wisdom. The Internet focuses on the realm of information, whose spread it facilitates exponentially. Ever-more-complex functions are devised, particularly capable of responding to questions of fact, which are not themselves altered by the passage of time. Search engines are able to handle increasingly complex questions with increasing speed. Yet a surfeit of information may paradoxically inhibit the acquisition of knowledge and push wisdom even further away than it was before.
The poet T. S. Eliot captured this in his “Choruses from ‘The Rock’”:
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
Facts are rarely self-explanatory; their significance, analysis, and interpretation—at least in the foreign policy world—depend on context and relevance. As ever more issues are treated as if of a factual nature, the premise becomes established that for every question there must be a researchable answer, that problems and solutions are not so much to be thought through as to be “looked up.” But in the relations between states—and in many other fields—information, to be truly useful, must be placed within a broader context of history and experience to emerge as actual knowledge. And a society is fortunate if its leaders can occasionally rise to the level of wisdom.
The acquisition of knowledge from books provides an experience different from the Internet. Reading is relatively time-consuming; to ease the process, style is important. Because it is not possible to read all books on a given subject, much less the totality of all books, or to organize easily everything one has read, learning from books places a premium on conceptual thinking—the ability to recognize comparable data and events and project patterns into the future. And style propels the reader into a relationship with the author, or with the subject matter, by fusing substance and aesthetics.
Traditionally, another way of acquiring knowledge has been through personal conversations. The discussion and exchange of ideas has for millennia provided an emotional and psychological dimension in addition to the factual content of the information exchanged. It supplies intangibles of conviction and personality. Now the culture of texting produces a curious reluctance to engage in face-to-face interaction, especially on a one-to-one basis.
The computer has, to a considerable extent, solved the problem of acquiring, preserving, and retrieving information. Data can be stored in effectively unlimited quantities and in manageable form. The computer makes available a range of data unattainable in the age of books. It packages it effectively; style is no longer needed to make it accessible, nor is memorization. In dealing with a single decision separated from its context, the computer supplies tools unimaginable even a decade ago. But it also shrinks perspective. Because information is so accessible and communication instantaneous, there is a diminution of focus on its significance, or even on the definition of what is significant. This dynamic may encourage policymakers to wait for an issue to arise rather than anticipate it, and to regard moments of decision as a series of isolated events rather than part of a historical continuum. When this happens, manipulation of information replaces reflection as the principal policy tool.
In the same way, the Internet has a tendency to diminish historical memory. The phenomenon has been described as follows: “People forget items they think will be available externally and remember items they think will not be available.” By moving so many items into the realm of the available, the Internet reduces the impulse to remember them. Communications technology threatens to diminish the individual’s capacity for an inward quest by increasing his reliance on technology as a facilitator and mediator of thought. Information at one’s fingertips encourages the mindset of a researcher but may diminish the mindset of a leader. A shift in human consciousness may change the character of individuals and the nature of their interactions, and so begin to alter the human condition itself. Did people in the age of printing see the same world as their medieval forefathers? Is the optical perception of the world altered in the age of the computer?
Western history and psychology have heretofore treated truth as independent of the personality and prior experience of the observer. Yet our age is on the verge of a changed conception of the nature of truth. Nearly every website contains some kind of customization function based on Internet tracing codes designed to ascertain a user’s background and preferences. These methods are intended to encourage users “to consume more content” and, in so doing, be exposed to more advertising, which ultimately drives the Internet economy. These subtle directions are in accordance with a broader trend to manage the traditional understanding of human choice. Goods are sorted and prioritized to present those “which you would like,” and online news is presented as “news which will best suit you.” Two different people appealing to a search engine with the same question do not necessarily receive the same answers. The concept of truth is being relativized and individualized—losing its universal character. Information is presented as being free. In fact, the recipient pays for it by supplying data to be exploited by persons unknown to him, in ways that further shape the information being offered to him.
Whatever the utility of this approach in the realm of consumption, its effect on policymaking may prove transformative. The difficult choices of policymaking are always close. Where, in a world of ubiquitous social networks, does the individual find the space to develop the fortitude to make decisions that, by definition, cannot be based on a consensus? The adage that prophets are not recognized in their own time is true in that they operate beyond conventional conception—that is what made them prophets. In our era, the lead time for prophets might have disappeared altogether. The pursuit of transparency and connectivity in all aspects of existence, by destroying privacy, inhibits the development of personalities with the strength to take lonely decisions.
American elections—especially presidential elections—represent another aspect of this evolution. It has been reported that in 2012 the election campaigns had files on some tens of millions of potentially independent voters. Drawn from research in social networks, open public files, and medical records, these files amounted to a profile for each, probably more precise than the target person would have been capable of doing from his own memory. This permitted the campaigns to choose the technology of their appeals—whether to rely on personal visits by committed friends (also discovered via the Internet), personalized letters (drawn from social network research), or group meetings.
Presidential campaigns are on the verge of turning into media contests between master operators of the Internet. What once had been substantive debates about the content of governance will reduce candidates to being spokesmen for a marketing effort pursued by methods whose intrusiveness would have been considered only a generation ago the stuff of science fiction. The candidates’ main role may become fund-raising rather than the elaboration of issues. Is the marketing effort designed to convey the candidate’s convictions, or are the convictions expressed by the candidate the reflections of a “big data” research effort into individuals’ likely preferences and prejudices? Can democracy avoid an evolution toward a demagogic outcome based on emotional mass appeal rather than the reasoned process the Founding Fathers imagined? If the gap between the qualities required for election and those essential for the conduct of office becomes too wide, the conceptual grasp and sense of history that should be part of foreign policy may be lost—or else the cultivation of these qualities may take so much of a president’s first term in office as to inhibit a leading role for the United States.
FOREIGN POLICY IN THE DIGITAL ERA
Thoughtful observers have viewed the globalizing transformations ushered in by the rise of the Internet and advanced computing technology as the beginning of a new era of popular empowerment and progress toward peace. They hail the ability of new technologies to enable the individual and to propel transparency—whether through the publicizing of abuses by authorities or the erosion of cultural barriers of misunderstanding. Optimists point, with some justification, to the startling new powers of communication gained through instantaneous global networks. They stress the ability of computer networks and “smart” devices to create new social, economic, and environmental efficiencies. They look forward to unlocking previously insoluble technical problems by harnessing the brainpower of networked multitudes.
One line of thinking holds that similar principles of networked communication, if applied correctly to the realm of international affairs, could help solve age-old problems of violent conflict. Traditional ethnic and sectarian rivalries may be muted in the Internet age, this theory posits, because “people who try to perpetuate myths about religion, culture, ethnicity or anything else will struggle to keep their narratives afloat amid a sea of newly informed listeners. With more data, everyone gains a better frame of reference.” It will be possible to temper national rivalries and resolve historical disputes because “with the technological devices, platforms and databases we have today, it will be much more difficult for governments in the future to argue over claims like these, not just because of permanent evidence but because everyone else will have access to the same source material.” In this view, the spread of networked digital devices will become a positive engine of history: new networks of communication will curtail abuses, soften social and political contradictions, and help heretofore-disunited parts cohere into a more harmonious global system.
The optimism of this perspective replicates the best aspects of Woodrow Wilson’s prophecy of a world united by democracy, open diplomacy, and common rules. As a blueprint for political or social order, it also raises some of the same questions as Wilson’s original vision about the distinction between the practical and the aspirational.
Conflicts within and between societies have occurred since the dawn of civilization. The causes of these conflicts have not been limited to an absence of information or an insufficient ability to share it. They have arisen not only between societies that do not understand each other but between those that understand each other only too well. Even with the same source material to examine, individuals have disagreed about its meaning or the subjective value of what it depicts. Where values, ideals, or strategic objectives are in fundamental contradiction, exposure and connectivity may on occasion fuel confrontations as much as assuage them.
New social and information networks spur growth and creativity. They allow individuals to express views and report injustices that might otherwise go unheeded. In crisis situations, they offer a crucial ability to communicate quickly and to publicize events and policies reliably—potentially preventing the outbreak of a conflict through misunderstanding.
Yet they also bring conflicting, occasionally incompatible value systems into ever closer contact. The advent of Internet news and commentary and data-driven election strategies has not noticeably softened the partisan aspect of American politics; if anything, it has provided a larger audience to the extremes. Internationally, some expressions that once passed unknown and unremarked are now publicized worldwide and used as pretexts for violent agitation—as occurred in parts of the Muslim world in reaction to an inflammatory fringe cartoon in a Danish newspaper or a marginal American homemade movie. Meanwhile, in conflict situations, social networking may serve as a platform to reinforce traditional social fissures as much as it dispels them. The widespread sharing of videotaped atrocities in the Syrian civil war appears to have done more to harden the resolve of the warring parties than to stop the killing, while the notorious ISIL has used social media to declare a caliphate and exhort holy war.
Some authoritarian structures may fall as a result of information spread online or protests convened via social networking; they may in time be replaced by more open and participatory systems elaborating humane and inclusive values. Elsewhere other authorities will gain exponentially more powerful means of repression. The proliferation of ubiquitous sensors tracking and analyzing individuals, recording and transmitting their every experience (in some cases now, essentially from birth), and (at the forefront of computing) anticipating their thoughts opens up repressive as well as liberating possibilities. In this respect, among the new technology’s most radical aspects may be the power it vests in small groups, at the pinnacle of political and economic structures, to process and monitor information, shape debate, and to some extent define truth.
The West lauded the “Facebook” and “Twitter” aspects of the Arab Spring revolutions. Yet where the digitally equipped crowd succeeds in its initial demonstrations, the use of new technology does not guarantee that the values that prevail will be those of the devices’ inventors, or even those of the majority of the crowd. Moreover, the same technologies used to convene demonstrations can also be used to track and suppress them. Today most public squares in any major city are subject to constant video surveillance, and any smartphone owner can be tracked electronically in real time. As one recent survey concluded, “The Internet has made tracking easier, cheaper, and more useful.”
The global scope and speed of communication erode the distinction between domestic and international upheavals, and between leaders and the immediate demands of the most vocal groups. Events whose effects once would have taken months to unfold ricochet globally within seconds. Policymakers are expected to have formulated a position within several hours and to interject it into the course of events—where its effects will be broadcast globally by the same instantaneous networks. The temptation to cater to the demands of the digitally reflected multitude may override the judgment required to chart a complex course in harmony with long-term purposes. The distinction between information, knowledge, and wisdom is weakened.
The new diplomacy asserts that if a sufficiently large number of people gather to publicly call for the resignation of a government and broadcast their demands digitally, they constitute a democratic expression obliging Western moral and even material support. This approach calls on Western leaders (and particularly American ones) to communicate their endorsement immediately and in unambiguous terms by the same social-networking methods so that their rejection of the government will be rebroadcast on the Internet and achieve further promulgation and affirmation.
If the old diplomacy sometimes failed to extend support to morally deserving political forces, the new diplomacy risks indiscriminate intervention disconnected from strategy. It declares moral absolutes to a global audience before it has become possible to assess the long-term intentions of the central actors, their prospects for success, or the ability to carry out a long-term policy. The motives of the principal groups, their capacity for concerted leadership, the underlying strategic and political factors in the country, and their relation to other strategic priorities are treated as secondary to the overriding imperative of endorsing a mood of the moment.
Order should not have priority over freedom. But the affirmation of freedom should be elevated from a mood to a strategy. In the quest for humane values, the expression of elevated principles is a first step; they must then be carried through the inherent ambiguities and contradictions of all human affairs, which is the task of policy. In this process, the sharing of information and the public support of free institutions are important new aspects of our era. On their own, absent attention to underlying strategic and political factors, they will have difficulty fulfilling their promise.
Great statesmen, however different as personalities, almost invariably had an instinctive feeling for the history of their societies. As Edmund Burke wrote, “People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.” What will be the attitudes of those who aspire to be great statesmen in the Internet age? A combination of chronic insecurity and insistent self-assertion threatens both leaders and the public in the Internet age. Leaders, because they are less and less the originators of their programs, seek to dominate by willpower or charisma. The general public’s access to the intangibles of the public debate is ever more constrained. Major pieces of legislation in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere often contain thousands of pages of text whose precise meaning is elusive even to those legislators who voted for them.
Previous generations of Western leaders performed their democratic role while recognizing that leadership did not consist of simply executing the results of public polls on a day-to-day basis. Tomorrow’s generations may prove reluctant to exercise leadership independent of data-mining techniques—even as their mastery of the information environment may reward them with reelection for pursuing cleverly targeted, short-term policies.
In such an environment, the participants in the public debate risk being driven less by reasoned arguments than by what catches the mood of the moment. The immediate focus is pounded daily into the public consciousness by advocates whose status is generated by the ability to dramatize. Participants at public demonstrations are rarely assembled around a specific program. Rather, many seek the uplift of a moment of exaltation, treating their role in the event primarily as participation in an emotional experience.
These attitudes reflect in part the complexity of defining an identity in the age of social media. Hailed as a breakthrough in human relations, social media encourage the sharing of the maximum amount of information, personal or political. People are encouraged—and solicited—to post their most intimate acts and thoughts on public websites run by companies whose internal policies are, even when public, largely incomprehensible to the ordinary user. The most sensitive of this information is to be made available only to “friends” who, in practice, can run into the thousands. Approbation is the goal; were it not the objective, the sharing of personal information would not be so widespread and sometimes so jarring. Only very strong personalities are able to resist the digitally aggregated and magnified unfavorable judgments of their peers. The quest is for consensus, less by the exchange of ideas than by a sharing of emotions. Nor can participants fail to be affected by the exaltation of fulfillment by membership in a crowd of ostensibly like-minded people. And are these networks going to be the first institutions in human history liberated from occasional abuse and therefore relieved of the traditional checks and balances?
Side by side with the limitless possibilities opened up by the new technologies, reflection about international order must include the internal dangers of societies driven by mass consensus, deprived of the context and foresight needed on terms compatible with their historical character. In every other era, this has been considered the essence of leadership; in our own, it risks being reduced to a series of slogans designed to capture immediate short-term approbation. Foreign policy is in danger of turning into a subdivision of domestic politics instead of an exercise in shaping the future. If the major countries conduct their policies in this manner internally, their relations on the international stage will suffer concomitant distortions. The search for perspective may well be replaced by a hardening of differences, statesmanship by posturing. As diplomacy is transformed into gestures geared toward passions, the search for equilibrium risks giving way to a testing of limits.
Wisdom and foresight will be needed to avoid these hazards and ensure that the technological era fulfills its vast promise. It needs to deepen its preoccupation with the immediate through a better understanding of history and geography. That task is not only—or even primarily—an issue for technology. Society needs to adapt its education policy to ultimate imperatives in the long-term direction of the country and in the cultivation of its values. The inventors of the devices that have so revolutionized the collection and sharing of information can make an equal if not greater contribution by devising means to deepen its conceptual foundation. On the way to the first truly global world order, the great human achievements of technology must be fused with enhanced powers of humane, transcendent, and moral judgment.