Strategic Reflection on Global Power Shifts and Networked Influence

by armies, by naval and air attacks. Now it is the ownership and use of connection, of networks and machine intelligence that will deliver real, perhaps even final, leverage. If the strategic aim of Europe’s leaders after Napoleon’s violent emergence and defeat was to restore a balance of power, if America’s grand strategic purpose after World War Two was the containment of the USSR and her totalizing ideologies, nations now must try for positions of security and for command during the uneasy transition ahead. The wellbeing of the whole system becomes a concern; entities, protocols and ideas that threaten the system’s health are the most urgent dangers, even as they represent seats of potentially historic power. We should ask: How is it that international cooperation occurs in an age of connection? Will it happen through slow, incremental movement? In sudden bursts? In fact, the routes to cooperation are rarely easy in any age. They involve overcoming old bureaucratic ideas, deeply held instincts of national interest, broken and humid and sometimes murderous psychological needs - all while accepting a new picture of power - and fresh risks and responsibilities. Our problem now, even in the face of these snapping traps, is to define a clear vision of our future security - and then to make a path to get there. No route exists today. “Originally, there were no roads in the world,” the Chinese writer Lu Xun observed in a famous story at the start of the last century. “It is only by walking on them that paths are made.”’® Ours is an age of first steps. The social scientists John Padgett and Walter Powell, after considering examples of epochal, collapsing change in political and biological systems of all sorts - Renaissance finance markets, coral reefs, innovation clusters, and others - summed up their conclusions in a little koan-like package of logic: “In the short run, actors create relations. In the long run, relations create actors.” 7? The nouns we worry about now, and the ones we hope for, take their meaning and their risk and energy from relations. Your genome connected is different and more hopeful than it is alone, unplugged, slipping into cancer. This idea that relations create actors is a powerful basis for a new, enduring - even decent - grand strategy for an age of revolutionary connection. It should also offer a check against some of our horrible miscalculations: America invaded Iraq, for instance, intending to replace one state with another. Instead we replaced a state with a network - and not one that we controlled. That web still resists our old habits of control. Relations of family and faith and clan link and activate murderous, relentless actors. The super power had all the nouns: Tanks, planes, soldiers, money. But we did not have the networks. We could not create relations. No move of ours held for long. We were like the team JIEEDO - trying to defeat the wrong thing entirely. 78 “Originally, there were no roads”: Lu Xun, “My Old Home” in Diary of a Madman and Other Stories Trans. William A. Lyell (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1990.) 89-100, though the translation of the line here is my own. 79 “In the short run”: John F. Padgett and Walter W. Powell, ”The Problem of Emergence” in The Emergence of Organizations and Markets, Princeton University Press, 2012 56 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018288