In this way, the spread of the American System-cum-globalization widens our pool of enemies while also making it more shallow: While emerging powers are increasingly integrated economically and great-power war remains off the table thanks to nuclear weapons, every pirate and smuggler and druggie and transnational terrorist/criminal now registers on our radar. By spreading our networks so, we now have to care about a host of small players who live like parasites on these systems—as they have for ages. For all the same reasons we link up with other economies and powers to manage these global networks, these parasites do the same. Hence, the notion emerges that all insurgencies are part of a global insurgency and all security responses to the same should be viewed as part and parcel of a global counterinsurgency. Security experts will often try to sell you these notions as new and radical, but you have to remember this: This fight against modernity by the jihadists is a problem of our success, not of our failure. We have to combat radical elements of Islam and other bad actors just as we fought all such characters in our own West more than a century ago. We just tamed all our out-of-control “badlands” a long time ago. Now we’re forced to do the same for the planet as a whole. Why? Again, those 3 billion new capitalists force the issue: We make money off one another and improve one another’s lives, and they need a lot more resources to pull off their rise, so our money is tied to their money and their money is tied to the Gap more and more. To secure our money, our networks, and our global economy, we must help them do the same for their own. Connectivity is the gift that keeps on giving . . . and empowering . . . and demanding.
Thus the global economy’s rapid expansion forces both the West and emerging markets to radically increase the resilience of all these new networks, especially those extending into regions still largely disconnected from globalization’s deep embrace, such as Africa and the Middle East. Very bad actors capable of very bad things tend to congregate in these thinly connected regions. Using guerrilla-style tactics, they can not only frustrate our efforts at postwar reconstruction in Afghanistan and Iraq, but also bring their weapons of “system disruption” eventually to the very networks and infrastructure that fuel globalization’s advance. The 9/11 attacks previewed this new form of system-focused warfare, and since that fateful day the U.S. military and government have struggled mightily to construct new operational approaches to tame and ultimately marginalize transnational terrorism.
What we have lacked most in this agonizingly slow adjustment is a good description of our enemy’s emerging tactics—in short, a “red team” exposé of our own system vulnerabilities. One of the first experts to attempt to scale that mountain was former Air Force special operations officer and terrorism expert John Robb, whose 2007 book, Brave New War, deserves both significant attention and vigorous debate, in large part because it makes the provocative case that global guerrillas using “open-source warfare” can defeat nation-states in the same way that Wikipedia has eclipsed the Encyclopaedia Britannica—the innovative mind of the many outweighs the dated knowledge of the few.
In an open-source world where research on, and development of, new technologies has become nearly as accessible as the Internet itself, conflicts are increasingly decided by which side learns the fastest. The same Internet that allows your teenager to share his or her latest video exploits with the world also enables what Robb calls the “bazaar of violence,” where bleeding-edge tactics are rapidly disseminated among globalization’s many extremist opponents. Global guerrillas are cheap and plentiful. By contrast, we field the few, the proud, and the incredibly expensive. The guerrillas change battlefield tactics daily. Until quite recently, our lumbering Leviathan developed new military doctrine every other decade or so. We wrap our efforts in great secrecy, but they swap their tradecraft over the Web, with every jihadist-wannabe on the planet downloading hints from Hezbollah.
Analogizing the Iraq insurgency to the 1930s Spanish Civil War, which debuted many tactics later employed in World War II, Robb argues that we’re glimpsing the future of terrorism designed to weaken states on globalization’s fringes and keep them in perpetual failure. Robb believes these same tactics, properly developed, can bring advanced economies to their knees. But even at their most ambitious, John Robb’s twenty-first-century “global guerrillas” don’t aspire to defeat our militaries or topple our governments, but merely to bankrupt both, hollowing out the West’s institutions to the point where Osama bin Laden’s vision of future—make that, feudal—order carries the day across the Islamic world. Robb warns, “This is the first time in modern history that a nonstate group has the ability to fight a global war and win.” If that assertion strikes you as a tad sci-fi, then you need to take a hard look at your thoroughly networked existence, says Robb, and contemplate the myriad choke points and soft underbellies and general brittleness we’ve baked into all our infrastructure—both hard and soft.
Here’s where Robb’s thesis stalls, in my opinion, because it’s one thing to keep a weak state in failure, but quite another thing to sow systemic chaos in advanced economies. After all, these societies advanced precisely by mastering such network complexity in the first place, typically in response to disasters and scandals that regularly perturbed their systems and thus exposed vulnerabilities. Thankfully, transnational terrorism remains a fringe activity with virtually no impact on the global economy’s performance, which has remained at near-record levels since 2001. By contrast, the cumulative impact of system perturbations caused by man-made and natural disasters in recent years has been far more substantial, and arguably far more beneficial in triggering new rule sets designed to prevent future disruptions.
But here is where Robb’s warnings are dead-on: Our global connectivity races ahead of our ability to manage all its vulnerabilities. In effect, our rules haven’t kept pace, and those gaps and bottlenecks become obvious targets for our enemies in this long war. “Hollowing out” advanced states may be a tall order, but applying just enough system disruption to torpedo an emerging market gets a whole lot easier. Think about how much simpler it would be to generate a true financial panic in China than, say, the United States. Authoritarian China may be more crudely robust in handling shocks to its less developed infrastructure, but it has nowhere near our capacity for processing financial crises through regulating/ intervening state entities, agile capital markets, a responsive insurance industry, or a federally insured banking sector—to name a few of our American institutions recently tested yet again. As for a far less robust but resource-rich Nigeria, there a small band of insurgents can easily generate overnight upward of a billion-dollar loss to the nation’s oil industry. Thus the weaker the state, the more damaging the bill and the easier it is for terrorists to create cascading network failures. The workarounds simply don’t yet exist.
Those failures inside the Gap can matter a tremendous amount to the Core as a whole, because, as statistician Nassim Taleb argues in his book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, globalization’s rapid spread creates a worldwide network environment that is “increasingly recursive,” meaning more feedback loops and thus more potential for snow-balling dynamics that are highly unpredictable but trigger planetwide, winner-take-all effects. History, Taleb reminds us, “does not crawl, it jumps.” While our tendency is to throw up some new Maginot Line of fortifications every time we get beat from one direction, all those globalization networks, and all the workarounds they enable, truly work in both directions: Bad effects can work around our defenses just as easily as our responses can work around the bad effects. If that sounds like a race of sorts, it is, but to imagine that terrorists are the only players on the “dark side” is incorrect. The most powerfully disruptive forces in our networks tend to be our own carelessness in operations and design. Our “stupid networks” truly limit the impact of nefarious bad actors (i.e., they get lost in the noise of day-to-day failures), as globalization’s vast expansion means, in Taleb’s words, that “the sources of Black Swans [highly improbable but h
igh-impact events] today have multiplied beyond measurability.”
“The pull of the sensational,” as Taleb puts it, means our attention is typically focused on purposeful bad actors, like terrorists and criminals who opt, as Robb says, to focus their activities in the world of “black globalization,” or the globalized version of any nation’s informal economy. For the same reason a nation can never quite get rid of criminal markets, the global economy will always feature some portion of black globalization. That such nefarious activities have ballooned in the last couple of decades is no surprise; the same thing always happens whenever frontiers are rapidly expanded. Indeed, that’s why we called it the “wild” American West. The trick for the Core’s great powers is to increase coordination among themselves in dealing with the Gap’s many sources of black globalization. How hard should this be? Not that hard. The Core’s rising resource requirements alone will force an immense amount of effort in improving the efficiency of globalization’s networks. That will decrease the black operations considerably. Moreover, as global warming changes food production patterns, the planet as a whole will be forced into even more transregional food trade, the requirements for which will force an even higher level of efficiency because of perishability and health concerns. Beyond all that, there’s simply globalization’s flat-world dynamic that pushes all global corporations toward making their networks as lean and efficient as possible in order to keep costs down.
So yes, it’s easy to overemphasize the threat of transnational terrorism even as it is a wonderful prompt to do a lot of things we should be pursuing anyway. The truth is, “al Qaeda central,” as terrorism expert Marc Sageman points out, is no longer the global control element it once was. As we now head into an era of predominantly “freelance” terrorism, we should be careful not to ascribe more coherence to our enemies than truly exists. The Middle East and Islam in general are joining globalization, which will only intensify the actions of radical jihadists in the short term even as their importance within the Islamic world already fades with time (e.g., less popular support for terrorism, more Islamist groups pursuing peaceful change). The only reason Islamic radicalism went global was that the threat these extremists faced was globalization itself. We can buy into al Qaeda’s propaganda that if America does A, B, and C, then this conflict is over, but the conflict was never really about us. We can get tagged—correctly—for being the progenitor of the global economy, and for playing globalization’s bodyguard, but at the end of the day it is globalization itself that will end the jihadists’ dreams of a back-to-the-future, pre-economic paradise where “righteous” men can be men and women will remain in their “natural” place. Against that enemy, these bad actors have no more chance than the Lakota guerrilla leader Crazy Horse had against the American System once gold and other mineral resources were found in them thar hills.
Having said that, it is unwise to underestimate the fear factor generated by transnational terrorism. Every system needs a bogeyman to force efficiencies and upgrades, and I say, better for globalization that Robb’s global guerrillas perform that role than to have economic nationalists make globalization itself the “great evil of our day.” Transnational terrorists and other criminal elements are the quintessential “short sellers” in globalization’s networks market: They seek out choke points and vulnerabilities and inefficiencies and exploit them for varieties of gain—monetary being the least impressive and damaging. To the extent we want to disintermediate these bad actors from this admittedly useful function (assuming we avoid Maginot Line/Berlin Wall responses), we need to harness globalization’s flat-world dynamics in the form of useful enforcers, or entities that trigger the same upgrades in security that bad actors sometimes do, but do so preemptively and pervasively and persistently, without the pain. Insurance companies always come to mind in this regard, but so too does any globally integrated enterprise (e.g., Toyota, Wal-Mart) that pushes its feeder nodes (producer/buyer chains) toward more efficient operations.
Thus, globalization needs many more watchdogs, and since watchdogs are typically posted after scandals erupt, America and the rest of the Core need to learn how to welcome such crises and scandals for what they represent—a chance to make all these networks work better. Just as in the American System, it’s not a matter of avoiding scandal per se, but rather of processing scandals as rapidly as possible. As the French Enlightenment philosopher René Descartes once put it, “Each problem that I solved became a rule which served afterwards to solve other problems.”
In globalization, this is the most valuable asset one can accumulate: good rules leading to good reputation.
THE NEW RULES: FROM “KNOW YOUR CUSTOMER” TO “KNOW YOUR SUPPLY CHAIN”
In the history of globalization’s rapid expansion in the last quarter of the twentieth century, two events stand out most. The first is Deng Xiaoping’s decision to begin marketizing China’s economy across the 1980s. The second is the contemporaneous decisions by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher to launch a wave of deregulation that, along with advances in information technology, laid the groundwork for the globalization of financial markets across the 1990s. The sum of these changes turbocharged globalization’s advance by radically increasing the velocity, volume, variety, and visibility of market transactions, or in Nayan Chanda’s terminology, the “four V’s” of “modern interconnectedness.” Naturally, bad actors jumped on that bandwagon, and after 9/11 we saw the empire strike back in the form of new and more stringent rules regarding all those transactions.
All of a sudden, thanks to the Bush administration’s USA Patriot Act, it wasn’t enough to say your bank processed all these money flows according to the old rules. Now banks were told that they needed to know exactly what kind of customers they were serving. That’s a pretty easy progression to understand when we’re talking about something as fungible and symbolic and uniform as money, but inevitably that logic must be extended into globalization’s supply chains—meaning, soon it won’t be enough just to know with whom you’re dealing; you’ll want verification of every ingredient in every product. In short, the global economy will soon be forced to account for every aspect in its supply chains just as if they were police departments handling evidence for a court trial.
While some of this coming network transparency will be triggered by a growing concern over carbon footprints and the general notion of improved energy efficiency, product liability and the potential for disease and poisoning outbreaks (both accidental and purposeful) will be a bigger driver, especially as global warming forces hyperconnectivity and hyper-dependency for all sorts of nations on the global economy’s food and water trade networks. It won’t be enough to say, “I can verify all these ingredients were put together correctly.” Increasingly, assemblers will be forced to verify the purity of their ingredients going all the way up the supply chain. Just as a modern automobile tends to be built with parts from all over the world, so, too, do modern foodstuffs, drugs, and all sorts of consumables with the potential to inflict harm on consumers.
The global food trade is a particular worry, because it combines loose international regulatory regimes with a highly fragmented production network. Yes, such a network is highly susceptible to terrorist attack, but again, quite frankly, that threat pales in comparison to what human mistakes and greed cost us every year in tainted products. The temptation, of course, is for the Old Core’s populations to demand “Made in [home country]” products, but since nobody is interested in dramatically raising the prices of food and drugs any more than necessary (indeed, global demand does that quite nicely), that impulse tends to dissipate as a rule (although persistently high oil prices can cut back a certain amount of globalization’s assembly traffic). Plus, in truth, it’s the supplying countries, like China, where the public typically faces the worst liabilities, meaning, if you think tainted Chinese products can hurt us now and then, they tend to ruin Chinese lives on a far more consistent basis.
Moreover, while it’s temptin
g to view a surge in global scandals as evidence that globalization’s network chains are out of control—even beyond control—we have to view these crises as positive evidence that a more “recursive environment,” as Taleb likes to describe globalization, is actually a more robust and therefore resilient environment. Each new feedback loop, however achieved (“vigilante consumers,” blogging muckrakers, etc.), increases the “what we know” pool while decreasing the “what we don’t know” universe. Granted, as the complexity and density of these networks increase, the “what we don’t know” universe will always tend to overshadow the known universe, but that just means that the dynamic management of rules becomes far more important. In effect, we need rules that are so smart that they can sense, think, and respond on their own (more on that in a bit).
One might think that this is an unprecedented global threat. Of course, all you have to do is go back to that great first “counterfeit nation” of the global economy—nineteenth-century caveat emptor America, full of criminals, scam artists, snake-oil salesmen, and the like—to realize that today’s China isn’t globalization’s first nation of outlaws but merely the latest in a long line that includes several current Core stalwarts like Japan and South Korea. The difference this time around, though, is significant. Back in the early days of globalization, the vast majority of food consumed was grown locally. That won’t be the case on a planet where global warming will shift regional food production patterns, largely through drought. It’s not just that the Gap will get a lot drier, and thus have a harder time than it already does in feeding itself. All those New Core economies, where the bulk of the burgeoning global middle class will emerge, will likewise find themselves unable to meet the demands of their populations for food—less in volume than in quality.
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