Thank You for Being Late

by Thomas L. Friedman

  • On January 27, 2015, in an interview with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, after that two-foot-wide quadcopter drone crashed on the White House grounds, President Obama made the following observation: “The drone that landed in the White House you buy in RadioShack.”

  Thanks to big data and the supernova, we can now find the needle in the haystack with incredible ease. At the same time, the super-empowered breakers can now inject that needle into the rest of us with incredible force and accuracy. The future will be a test of who finds who first. Consider this February 18, 2016, story from NewScientist.com:

  Extortion is bigger business than ever, and now it doesn’t have to rely on people depositing bags stuffed with cash. Earlier this month, cybercriminals attacked a hospital in Los Angeles, then demanded payment in bitcoin to let the hospital regain access to their computers. It’s the most high-profile case yet of cyber-extortion using software known as ransomware.

  The attack on Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center effectively knocked it offline. As a result, patients had to be diverted to other hospitals, medical records were kept using pen and paper, and staff resorted to communicating by fax.

  The attackers demanded 9,000 bitcoins—around $3.6 million. After a two-week stand-off, the hospital yesterday paid out $17,000 …

  “Ransomware has really exploded in the last couple of years,” says Steve Santorelli, a former UK police detective who now works for Team Cymru, a threat intelligence firm based in Florida. One ransomware package, CryptoLocker 3.0, is thought to have earned attackers $325 million in 2015 alone.

  “These guys are crazy sophisticated,” says Jake Williams, the founder of cybersecurity firm Rendition Infosec …

  Ross Anderson, a security researcher at the University of Cambridge, says bitcoin has helped cybercriminals to access payments without being caught. “In the old days, collecting ransom was really hard. The police would just put a radio tracker in the carpet bag full of £20 notes, and they would always get the guy. Now it’s possible to collect ransoms by bitcoin. Lots of people are doing it.”

  Last story: In a February 9, 2016, worldwide threat assessment report to the Senate Armed Services Committee, James Clapper, the U.S. director of national intelligence, added gene editing—for the first time—to a list of threats posed by “weapons of mass destruction and proliferation.” As the MIT Technology Review noted on that day, “Gene editing refers to several novel ways to alter the DNA inside living cells. The most popular method, CRISPR, has been revolutionizing scientific research, leading to novel animals and crops, and is likely to power a new generation of gene treatments for serious diseases. It is gene editing’s relative ease of use that worries the U.S. intelligence community, according to the assessment.” Clapper’s report said: “Given the broad distribution, low cost, and accelerated pace of development of this dual-use technology, its deliberate or unintentional misuse might lead to far-reaching economic and national security implications.”

  No Known Home Address

  It is not just the fact that individual breakers can now do more damage more cheaply and more easily that is so unnerving. It’s that they no longer need a traditional organization to arm or direct them—an organization that can be tracked and destroyed by police or armies.

  In recent years we have seen the steady rise of the “loner terrorist.” We’ve seen individuals, couples, or very small groups, sometimes brothers and cousins, often psychologically disturbed, who get radicalized in a very short period of time after tapping into jihadist or other flows online. They then go out and perpetrate grand acts of violence against innocent civilians, many of them only claiming allegiance to an Islamist or other cause ex post facto.

  On July 14, 2016, such a man drove his truck into the Bastille Day crowd in Nice, France, killing eighty-five people and wounding hundreds. The entire phenomenon is condensed into a few paragraphs of a Daily Telegraph report:

  Tunisian-born Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel—described as a “weird loner” who “became depressed” when his wife left him—was a French passport holder who lived in the Riviera city and was regularly in trouble with the law.

  Bouhlel was reportedly not on a terrorist watch list and investigators are seeking to establish his motives—and are also looking for possible accomplices.

  A psychiatrist who saw him in 2004 told L’Express that Bouhlel had come to him because of behavioral problems and that he diagnosed him as suffering from “the beginnings of psychosis.”

  The French interior minister, Bernard Cazeneuve, said the attacker “appears to have become radicalised very quickly” as one neighbor of his estranged wife added: “Mohamed only started visiting a mosque in April…”

  Bouhlel’s phone is said to be full of messages, videos and photographs, including ones of men and women he had recently slept with …

  He visited gyms and salsa bars regularly, and would also visit websites “showing pictures of executions,” said BFM TV.

  “The busy sex life of a man who had recently discovered a religious faith is shown by the data on the device,” BFM added.

  The divorced father-of-three also used his phone to prepare his attack on civilians, including hundreds of children enjoying a Bastille Day fireworks display.

  He also took a selfie of himself inside the hired truck just before heading off on his killing and maiming spree, [e-mailing] it to family members in his native Tunisia.

  It is as if accelerated global flows through social networks are heating up certain people who live on the margins of societies and inspiring and encouraging them to engage in hero-in-their-own-minds acts of violence. They want to go out with a bang that the whole world gets to see—even though they are not formal members of any organization.

  The strategist George Friedman, chairman of the research firm Geopolitical Futures, explains why these self-motivated lone wolves and small groups may be the future of terrorism—and why they are so hard to deter. In the decade after 9/11, “at its heart, the United States’ strategy was to identify terrorist groups and destroy them,” Friedman wrote on GeopoliticalFutures.com on July 26, 2016. “The assumption was that terrorism required an organization. Progress in this strategy meant identifying an organization or a cell planning terror operations and disrupting or destroying it … Operationally, the strategy worked. Terrorists were identified and killed. As the organizations were degraded and broken, terrorism declined—but then surged.”

  The reason it surged anew may be because breakers can so easily come together now, just like a maker’s start-up, and act on their own. As a result, groups like ISIS may depend less on command and control and more on being the inspirer, the organization that heats up the molecules through social networks and then just sits back and enjoys the show.

  As Friedman put it, “The essential problem has been a persistent misunderstanding of radical Islamism. It is a movement, not an organization.” Organizations can be penetrated, broken and their leadership structure and headquarters annihilated. That is much harder with a diffuse movement. It is why the Pentagon keeps announcing that it killed this or that “senior ISIS leader,” but the movement only continues.

  “For 15 years, the operational focus for the U.S. has been the destruction of terrorist organizations,” Friedman added. “The reason for this is that destroying a particular group creates the illusion of progress. However, as one group is destroyed, another group arises in its name. For example, al-Qaida is being replaced by the Islamic State. The real strength of Islamist terrorism is the movement that the organization draws itself from and that feeds it. So long as the movement is intact, any success at destroying an organization is, at best, temporary and, in reality, an illusion.”

  It should be clear by now that our conventional, special operations–based approach to defeating this phenomenon is not succeeding. The only thing that might work, argued Friedman, is “to bring pressure on Muslim states to make war on the jihadists and on other strands of Islam to do so as well. The pressure must be in
tense and the rewards substantial. The likelihood of it working is low. But the only way to eliminate this movement is for Muslims to do it.” To deter this kind of breaker our first line of defense has to be their families, psychiatrists, schoolteachers, and neighbors, who can detect changes in personal behavior far faster than any intelligence agency. It takes a village to deter a breaker of this kind.

  The New Balance of Power

  During the Cold War, if you wanted to assess the global balance of power you would likely look at the annual survey The Military Balance, published by the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies, and self-described as the most “trusted military data on 171 countries: size of armed forces, defense budgets, equipment.” That book would tell you the relative strengths of their armies, navies, and air forces (their hard power), and their “soft power”: the relative strengths of their economies, their societal appeal, and the degree of entrepreneurship in their culture. And if you added up all those numbers, you would have a rough measure of the balance of power between different nation-states.

  Not anymore. Assessing today’s balance of power requires a much wider lens. “In the old days, when you talked about the balance of power, you were really talking about conventional forces, nuclear forces, and the framework of arms control to regulate them,” John Chipman, the director of the International Institute of Strategic Studies, told me. “There was an easy consensus on every measure of power and how you count them. It was purely a math problem.” But today, conventional military power, while still important, is only one factor. If you want to measure the balance of power now, if you want to explain geopolitics, let alone manage it, you need to consider the power of one, the power of machines, and the power of flows and how all of that is breaking down weak states and empowering breakers—all in a more interdependent world.

  In trying to manage such a world, “you can’t just pull out the old playbook,” observed U.S. Defense Secretary Ashton Carter. “Destructive power of greater and greater magnitude now can be delivered by smaller and smaller hands … You’re kidding yourself if you think you’re in a world where all you have to think about are states.”

  Learning to ADD

  For all these reasons, geopolitics has to be reimagined in the age of accelerations, just like everything else. To be sure, you can still score a lot of points these days on the op-ed pages or on the campaign trail by blithely pretending that the United States can do what it always did—as President Kennedy put it in his inaugural, “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” But that is not going to happen. The post–post–Cold War world, alas, has been a cold shower for America’s (not to mention my own) can-do optimism. We have learned the hard way in Iraq and Afghanistan that liberty taking root depends much less on what we do than on what they do, and if they are not ready to pay that price, bear that burden, meet that hardship, support one another, and collectively oppose the foes of liberty, we cannot do it for them. We’ve learned that while we can transplant hearts, and we can transplant boots on the ground, we cannot transplant political culture—and particularly an ethic of pluralism—where there is no topsoil of trust.

  And, finally, we have learned that when the major threat of instability is the “weakism” and “disintegrationism” of existing states, and the rise of super-empowered individuals and small bands of breakers, our traditional power-tool kit is insufficient to meet these threats—on our own. We cannot put every Humpty Dumpty state back together again—on our own. And we cannot find every needle, every super-empowered angry person, in a haystack before it sticks us—on our own.

  In short, we have to face two fundamental facts about geopolitics today:

  Fact #1: The necessary is impossible.

  Fact #2: The impossible is necessary.

  That is, while we cannot repair the wide World of Disorder on our own, we also cannot just ignore it. It metastasizes in an interdependent world. If we don’t visit the World of Disorder in the age of accelerations, it will visit us. This is especially true when you know that the age of accelerations is going to continue to hammer frail states and produce migration flows, particularly from Africa and the Middle East toward Europe, as well as more super-empowered breakers.

  So what to do?

  In an earlier historical epoch, we could usually count on some giant imperialist power sweeping into these regions of disorder—like northern Nigeria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, or Syria—and imposing order from the outside and crushing “the breakers.” In the Cold War, Russia effectively occupied all of Eastern Europe, suppressing not only its freedoms but also its ethnic conflicts. For five centuries the Ottomans managed most of the Middle East in the same way. But today we live in a postimperial and a postcolonial world. No great power wants to occupy anybody. As we’ve seen, the major powers have all learned the hard way that when you occupy another country all that you win is a bill. It is much easier to import a country’s labor and natural resources—or their brainpower online—than it is to take them over.

  Also, in an earlier historical epoch, like World War II or the Cold War, we could more easily galvanize an alliance of like-minded democracies to combat this threat to global stability. Today, “weakism” and “disintegrationism” do not have the galvanizing power of Nazism or the Red Menace. They also don’t lend themselves to the traditional tools of warfare—tanks, planes, and troops—and they don’t hold out the satisfying prospect of a “V-E Day”—a final victory—and a ticker-tape parade with “When Johnny Comes Marching Home.” Nation-rebuilding or disorder-containing and breaker-deterring are much more diffuse and longer-term projects and much less morally satisfying.

  Moreover, while we don’t have the resources to solve the problem of disorder by intervening over there, we also cannot solve the problem of disorder from over here—in the West. The sudden and massive influx of refugees from Africa and the Middle East has overwhelmed the absorptive capacity of the European Union and triggered a populist-nationalist backlash, while also prompting the EU to start limiting its policy of free movement of people between countries. The June 2016 British vote to withdraw from the EU was driven in no small degree by anti-immigration sentiment.

  And we still cannot ignore the challenges posed to international order by our rival superpowers Russia and China, which, because they are authoritarian states, are not as vulnerable to disorder or breakers as are open societies in the West.

  Add it all up, ladies and gentlemen, and what you have is a perfect example of a “wicked problem”—many stakeholders, but no agreement on the problem definition or on the solution. And doing nothing will become increasingly unsustainable.

  So I repeat, what to do?

  If I were reimagining geopolitics from an American/Western perspective in such a world, I would begin with the most honest statement I can offer: I don’t know what is sufficient to restore order to the World of Disorder—one should be very humble in the face of such a wicked problem—but I am fairly certain of what is necessary.

  It’s a policy that can be called ADD, because those are its initials: amplify, deter, and degrade.

  Knowledge Is Power

  Let’s go through the logic of each element and see why they can add up to a national security strategy for a country like America today—starting with “amplify.” It is a truism, but one worth repeating, that disorder and the rise of super-empowered breakers on the scale that we are seeing in the Middle East and Africa is a product of failed states unable to keep up with the age of accelerations and enable their young people to realize their full potential. But these trends are exacerbated by climate change, population growth, and environmental degradation, which are undermining the agricultural foundations that sustain vast African and Middle Eastern populations on rural lands. The combination of failing states and failing agriculture is producing millions of young people, particularly young men, who have never held a job, never held
power, and never held a girl’s hand.

  That terrible combination of humiliating pathologies is then preyed upon by jihadist-Islamist ideologues (with money), who promise these young people redemption or ninety-nine virgins in heaven if they double down on backwardness—if they go back to a seventh-century Islamist puritanical lifestyle. As George Friedman pointed out above, we cannot reverse these trends on our own; the will has to come from within these societies. But we can raise the odds that they will do it themselves by raising the number of people with the will to do so. What America and the West can do—and have not done nearly enough of—is to invest in and amplify the islands of decency and the engines of capacity-building in countries in, or bordering on, the World of Disorder. When we invest in the tools that enable young people to realize their full potential, we are countering the spread of humiliation, which is the single biggest motivator for people to go out and break things.

  In May 2012—a year after the Arab awakening erupted—the United States made two financial commitments to the Arab world that each began with the numbers 1 and 3. The U.S. gave Egypt’s military regime $1.3 billion worth of tanks and fighter jets. It also gave Lebanese public school students a $13.5 million merit-based college scholarship program, putting 117 Lebanese kids through local American-style colleges that promote tolerance, gender and social equality, and critical thinking. Having visited both countries at that time, I noted in a column that the $13.5 million in full scholarships bought the Lebanese more capacity and America more friendship and stability than the $1.3 billion in tanks and fighter jets ever would. So how about we stop being stupid? How can sending planes and tanks to a country—Egypt—where half the women and a quarter of the men can’t read possibly end well?