World Order (46 page)

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 begin
in 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.

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.