From World Politics Review, July 7, 2009
John Robb
In 1946, George Kennan keyed the famous “Long Telegram,” which identified the Soviet Union as an enemy of the United States. In 1947, the original telegram was reworked and published in Foreign Policy magazine as “The Sources of Soviet Conduct.” Together, these documents formed the codex for the U.S. Cold War strategy of containment, and thereby the basis of the eventual U.S. victory in that conflict. Here’s what a “Kennan” might have written for the 21st century.
The Nature of the Threat Posed by Globalization
We are now engaged in a conflict that will dictate whether we succeed or fail in the 21st century. Our adversary in this conflict is, in short, the threat posed by globalization.
This threat is completely alien to our mode of thought. It is unlike previous threats we have faced since there isn’t a single source of ideological opposition: no collective mind or body of thought to contest with, no single enemy that can be named with clarity across all venues. It is, instead, a systemic threat, one posed by the very function of a system we have created for our mutual benefit: a morally neutral, global supernetwork that spans all salient features of modern life, from communications to economics.
The threat posed by the emergence of this global supernetwork comes in three forms. Let’s examine them in detail.
Extreme and Chaotic Behavior
News in the age of the global supernetwork is often startling. It features an endless procession of crushing financial panics, unexpected food shortages, sharp commodity price spikes, brazen terrorist attacks that have shut down major cities from New York to Sao Paulo to Mumbai, and much more. These extreme events form a pattern of behavior that should serve as an alarm. They are an indication that the system we have come to rely upon, the global supernetwork that connects us to each other and all manner of goods and services is entering a period of extreme turbulence, where we careen from crisis to crisis at an increasing rate and incremental severity. At worst, it may even be an indication of a looming catastrophic failure of indeterminable duration.
From the standpoint of systemic analysis, our global supernetwork is what is called a dynamically unstable system, or one so responsive and interconnected (i.e., tightly coupled), that it is prone to operating in an uncontrolled manner. That, unfortunately, is the way we made it. Through an organic growth process that emphasized business needs and economic efficiency, we have built a complex web of instantaneous communications, just-in-time computer systems, daily multi-trillion-dollar financial flows, and much more. Even more, we have geared up the system with extreme levels of debt and energy-use to reach the limits of potential performance.
All of this amped-up connectivity provides our global system with an ability to rapidly shift from task to task as the conditions warrant. However, it also makes the system prone to over-reaction and self-reinforcing feedback loops, such that even small changes in the right conditions can cause the system to careen to extreme behavior. Typically, we build systems like this only when we are sure we can control them. For example, high-performance aircraft are dynamically unstable systems. They are designed to want to maneuver, rather than fly straight and level. However, if they aren’t precisely managed — down to the millisecond — by computerized control systems, they will quickly careen into uncontrolled maneuvers that generate forces exceeding the structural capacity of their airframe. In short, one of these planes will wind up a smoking crater if the computer system fails to control its operation for even a couple of seconds. . . . Read the whole article.
