Americans seem pretty smug about the global communications network: The Web spreads democratic ideas in China, and cell phones help bring down a corrupt regime in the Philippines. But all that might bite the US in the ass. In The Shield of Achilles - a new classic for geopolitical wonks - Philip Bobbitt, a law professor at the University of Texas at Austin, warns that innovations that allow a state to prevail also plant the seeds of its demise. Bobbitt, who's ex-State Department and ex-National Security Council, says the nukes, computers, and communications that won the Cold War are reshaping the nation-state into the "market-state." And things don't look good for representative democracy.
WIRED: The US won the last round with technology. Why shouldn't it keep winning?
Bobbitt: Catching a wave of innovation carries a nation to dominance for a long time - a century. But then that nation begins to face challenges from countries that have been compelled to innovate because they don't have the assets the dominant powers do. The dominant powers' successful strategies begin to work against them.
So what's playing against us?
Rapid computation and communication. I can sit in a flat in London and talk to anyone in the world. That kind of thing doesn't show up in GDP figures, but it's enormously enriching. The shadow side is that we put more and more of that wealth back into rapid computation and international communications. So if someone disrupts those networks, the cost is infinitely greater. As we become richer, we become more vulnerable. This is the bargain we've made. This vulnerability has been one of the prime causes of the terrorism we're now facing in the 21st century.
But the US benefits from those technologies.
Less and less. Communication has become so rapid that our leaders don't have the luxury of thinking before they react. That has a delegitimizing effect. Legitimacy is maintained by appearances, but in the global news cycle, the president has to respond to every new development in six hours instead of six days. It pushes us toward Drudgification of the news, to use a horrible term. Rapid communication is also moving us away from a representative system and toward direct democracy. Look at the recall in California or the voter initiatives in Washington and Oregon. These are 19th-century populist models that have a tremendous future in the 21st because they're closer to a market model than our representative democracy. It's a step away from the nation-state and toward a market-state.
That's about politics, not war.
But today's terrorists couldn't have achieved what they have without these technologies. Look what bin Laden has done with the Internet and with satellite and cell phones - he's taken terrorism and transformed it into a market model. He doesn't have tight vertical control of the operations; he only provides financing and infrastructure. That's how Mastercard runs its operation, too.
Then why can't the US keep up?
The US intelligence community is not well adapted to fight global terrorism because it was extremely well adapted to fight the Cold War. That was a triumph, and we were able to preserve our civil liberties. And now our success is killing us.
- Paul O'Donnell
credit:Photo by Matthew Mahon
Guarded: Bobbitt says bin Laden is beating us with our own tools.
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