THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES

by Bobbitt, Philip

  A third kind of war whose duration and consequences might prove epochal is an endless, low-intensity conflict with some states and nonstate groups whose plights are the consequence of an evolving pluralist society of market-states. It is obvious, I suppose, that some of these groups are drawn from those who oppose the emergence of the market-state in the first place: states that have been destroyed by globalization and cultural groups that are threatened by universal communications and migration. It is perhaps less obvious that there are other groups spawned by this development that actually thrive in the new environment but that are no less dangerous—criminal conspiracies, anarchic movements, transnational and subnational terrorists of many varying motivations. Finally, it is least obvious that the society of market-states is the target of national groups that are still in thrall to the romance of the nation-state: French Canadians in Quebec; Kurds in Turkey, Iraq, and Iran; Sikhs in the Punjab; Basques and Catalans in Spain; Indians in the Central American states, and others. One would imagine that the society of market-states, with its many varying territorial forms, would make a diffuse target for such unfashionable and passionate dreams. For the society of market-states there is no essential difference between umbrella states like the European Union or the Asian Pacific Economic Council, and leagues of great scope (like NAFTA) or small compass (like Italy's Northern League) or even nonterritorial entities like CNN, the Shell Oil Group, the Medellin Cartel, or Hamas. But this agnosticism does not make it any easier to satisfy the ambitions of irredentist nationalities: the drive of stranded nations like the Kurds for a state makes them hard to bribe, in the economic sense of that term, because they have a single, nonnegotiable demand that, by the nature of the new society of states, it is very difficult for them to achieve. Unlike Wilson and House, the leaders of market-states do not create nation-states. Yet the indifference of the market-states to such demands can provoke efforts to get their attention.

  If we wish to avoid cataclysmic war and invisible, silent war, we shall have to learn how to wage wars like the ones in Yugoslavia and Afghanistan, using the tactics of relentless airstrikes, special forces teams, and indigenous allies. This means, pre-eminently, that we shall have to develop rules for intervention.9 Out of this new epochal conflict can come, some day, the consensus that will provide the basis for a constitution for the society of the new form of the state.

  In the meantime, we shall have to reorient our concerns to cope with the changes brought about by the emergence of the market-states. Let me give seven examples of this reorientation, the fifth of which (critical infrastructure) I will discuss in somewhat greater detail. In each of these cases the difficulty arises along the seam between the nation-state and the market-state. The nation-state is oblivious to these issues because it treats them from a perspective that is indifferent to the externalities they impose on other states. What does it matter, for example, if the state of Colombia is ruined by U.S. drug consumption; that is, after all, Colombia's affair. The U.S. is doing everything in its power to stop such consumption—except, of course, compromising on our deeply held value that the state should protect its citizens from toxic substances.

  At the same time, each of these cases is an example of market failure: that is, the market acting alone in the absence of state regulation is indifferent to these issues. What does it matter to the market, for example, whether there are international rules for access to technology? If an economic profit can be made by sales of high-speed computers to Iran, or missile parts to Iraq, or fissile material to North Korea, that is surely all that is of interest to the market.

  (1)

  The role of the news media has changed, constitutionally speaking, in the last three periods of the state.10 In the era of the state-nation the constitutional role of the press was foremost to transmit the political leadership's views. This often amounted to functioning as an organ to shape public opinion. Napoleon's bulletins provide a good example.* So do the Federalist Papers, first published as essentially op-ed pieces, and the journalism that powered the French Revolution. In the nation-state period, to this role was added the function of informing leaders about the public reaction as the public spoke back to government through the media. William Randolph Hearst's famous remark (“You provide the pictures, I'll provide the war”) showed a shrewd appreciation of this. The pivotal role played by the New York Times in opposing the War in Viet Nam that it had so heartily supported and the Washington Post's crucial exposure of Watergate felonies both showed the press not only leading the public but also constantly reporting trends in public opinion on the same issues. Editorial opinion and its counterparts in the electronic media eventually stood for public opinion. When the CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite turned against the Viet Nam War, President Johnson is reported to have concluded that his war policies no longer had the confidence of the public.11

  In the market-state, the media have begun to act in direct competition with the government of the day. The media are well situated to succeed in this competition because they are trained to work in the marketplace, are more nimble than bureaucrats hampered by procedural rules, are quick to spot public trends, can call on huge capitalizations, can rely on sophisticated managers and technocrats, and are the most capable users—far outpacing politicians—of the contemporary techniques of advertising and public relations. Finally the media, protected in many countries by statutes and constitutional amendments, are free of many of the legal and political restraints that bind government officials.

  The changing role of the media as it enters the era of the market-state is felt in many quarters. David Anderson, a law professor and former journal-iist, has observed that the constitutional protections surrounding libel defendants have been transformed from protection for the lonely, vilified civil libertarian to an insurance policy for media multinationals.12 To take another example, one aspect of President Clinton's difficulties in persuading the public that the campaign of vilification directed against him came from a “right-wing conspiracy” is that some of its most avid adherents were liberal journalists. They were not conspirators—at least not of the right-wing variety—so much as soldiers in an historic struggle to wrest power from the presidency, and to gain even greater control over the electoral process than the media now enjoys.

  Indeed the competitive, critical function of the media in the market-state is similar to that of the political parties of the Left in the nation-state: the Left was always a critical organ in government, reproving, harassing, questioning the status quo; it sought a governing role even though whenever Left parties held office, they quickly moved to the center, co-opting (or being co-opted by) the Right. Now with the discrediting of the Left in the market-state, this competitive critical function has been taken up by the media.*

  The media are completely untrained in this task—ethically or politically. Much the same can be said for the leadership of the great multinational corporations (of whom the media empires form a subset). Nor can these institutions expect much guidance from the political class that has so enslaved itself to the market via its reliance on campaign contributions.

  Relations between the media and the other organs of government are further exacerbated by the fact that in the market-state the public's attitude toward what can be accomplished by government changes (and thus also changes with respect to the scope of personal responsibility). Now it is up to the individual to avoid problems, not up to the state to fix them. If there are unsafe areas of town, the citizen is best advised not to go there, rather than expect the police to ensure a safe environment. If a person becomes a politician or seeks fame, he will get little sympathy if he is badly treated thereafter: he sought the role, and therefore he bought into a bargain that includes loss of privacy, jeopardy to reputation, loss of earnings. The market is inherently unpredictable, so persons become more fatalistic; the nation-state, based on the operations of law rather than the market, gave a sense, perhaps illusory, that expectations would be fulfilled through policy.

/>   In the transition, the nation-state will appear to be doing even worse than it is. Popular appreciation will plummet because the public has been persuaded that the government cannot accomplish anything positive of note. This is partly due to the switch in roles by the media, which retain the credibility of reportage but now also have the mission of opposition. Business activities—and the activities of business leaders—are replacing politics as the central source of news about the welfare of the people.

  Absent the threat of war, it is very difficult to believe that the publics will be eager to follow the urgings of their political leaderships to make the sacrifices that states often require. This development will strain the political structures of the great powers to their utmost, making them vulnerable to delegitimation in a crisis. Political leaders may find they are able to inspire a sense of mission only through the shrewd manipulation of the media, a short-lived tactic that ultimately must invite contempt. At the same time, some sectors of the public will become more credulous, more willing to believe preposterous stories about government cover-ups.

  (2)

  At present when we consider environmental threats to the collectivity of mankind, we have tended to concentrate our concerns on cumulative threats like global warming and the destruction of the ozone layer. When we think about environmental events that threaten a single state, we focus on oil spills, desertification, and deforestation. We have neglected events relating to the environment that bring about conflict among the members of the society of states. Crises like those provoked by the meltdown of a nuclear reactor, the incubation of an infectious disease, the migration of industrial pollutants or water-table contaminants, genetic interventions with unanticipated consequences all will put stress on an international system that is steadily divesting itself of legitimate universal legal institutions, even as it is creating new global economic ones. During much of the period in which the particulate ash and smoke from the fires in northern Mexico blanketed Texas in 1998, Mexico refused U.S. assistance in putting the fires out. When a Russian submarine with a nuclear reactor aboard was crippled in 2000, Russia similarly refused assistance until it was too late to rescue its crew. The president of South Africa once took the view that AIDS was not related to HIV and could have, had he persisted, greatly worsened a transnational epidemic. These incidents may be harbingers of the sorts of environmental problems that can easily lead to conflict.

  Nation-states tend to treat epidemiological matters in nonsecurity terms. Air travelers, for example, are routinely screened for carrying weapons across national borders; they are seldom required to demonstrate that they are free of lethal communicable infections. By viewing such matters as international security issues, the market-state sets the stage for strategic conflict over their resolution.

  (3)

  Nation-states continue to think in terms of maintaining control of conventional agricultural and industrial raw materials (like food and oil) by encompassing them within their territories, neglecting to put in place rules of behavior that will govern the distribution of goods like water and technology when these are at least as likely to be the source of interstate conflict in the future. Hitherto restrictions on technology transfers—like those governing the export of high-speed computers that can be used in missile telemetry—arose from state conflicts like the Cold War. In the future such restrictions may themselves be the cause of conflict.

  (4)

  Nation-states tend to treat crime and corruption in terms of the laws of a single state, using suppression to its fullest effect. This overlooks the destructive economic and political effects in other societies of the markets in illegal enterprises created by such national suppression. The inadvertent consequences of the United States's attempted suppression of cocaine consumption has perhaps done more harm to the polities of many Third World governments than meddling and intervention ever did.

  (5)

  The next example of the historic juxtaposition of these two archetypal forms of the State is potentially the most disturbing. This is the set of issues that is becoming known as the problem of “critical infrastructure.” A society's critical infrastructure is composed of those elements— telecommunications, energy, banking and finance, transportation, government services—that undergird modern life such that their extended interdiction would have consequences for the sustainability of that way of life. Historically, these elements were confined to national territories. Moreover, these individual elements of the infrastructure were physically and conceptually separate systems that had little interdependence. Generation of electricity by the local power company did not depend, in any immediate way, on the operations of the local phone company or the local bank; the German phone company did not depend on the British phone system, nor did the Japanese banking system depend on the day-to-day operations of the Italian banking system. Beginning in the mid-eighties, however, the interplay among a number of factors created a new largely intangible infrastructure, the international superinfrastructure, that is critically essential to, yet also critically dependent upon, each of the traditionally recognized infrastructures. The factors bringing about the emergence of this superinfrastructure include the many developments in information and communications technology, but also, crucially, a change in attitude among the most highly developed members of the society of states about the role of government and the market. This change in values within many states—which is encapsulated by the claim that we are moving from the era of the nation-state to that of the market-state—has had two effects that are relevant to this problem. First, it has vastly enhanced the vulnerability of the critical infrastructure of states because the reshaping of the various sectors mentioned above (banking, energy, and so on) has taken the path of greater efficiency rather than greater national security. Deregulation and greater competition have meant that there are now more competing operators with access to critical systems, and that operators are no longer monopolists with annual profits guaranteed by the State with which they can be relied upon to cooperate in matters of national interest. The new players have a different attitude toward their responsibilities to the society in which they operate.

  Second, each government's role in protecting its state'S infrastructure has become bewilderingly complex, even paralyzing. Two facts are sufficient to make it so: most of the critical infrastructure for the most developed state is in the hands of the private sector, which thus controls the information on which any attempts to ensure security depend; and the origin of attacks on these infrastructures can be made impossible to trace, so that traditional strategies of deterrence and retaliation become irrelevant. It may or it may not be in the interests of Lloyds Bank to disclose to government authorities that a successful intrusion into its accounts had been made by a cyberattack that has cracked its security codes via the Internet, but even if a national government learned of such an attack, which ministry has jurisdiction? Should the intrusion be treated as a domestic crime? As a foreign attack? And if a foreign attack, is it by a state or a criminal conspiracy or some subnational group? Or is the entire affair the work of a disgruntled employee or simply a glitch in the software? Who has the authority to answer these questions, bearing in mind that the costs to the society of an unreported attack will almost always be greater than the costs borne by the private enterprise that suffers the initial loss, but that the private enterprise can be global while the exclusive jurisdiction of the State is, by definition, territorially limited.

  The core elements of the international superinfrastructure are the telecommunications networks—which include the landline networks of long-distance telephone carriers, cellular networks, and satellite services—and the collection of information technologies that in the year 2000 was composed of 400 million computers worldwide—about 50 percent of which were in the United States, Germany having 7 percent, China 1 percent—and the Internet, a global network interconnected by means of routers that use a common set of protocols to provide communication among users th
en numbering about 32 million devices, and expected by 2002 to encompass about 300 million worldwide. Taken together, these three networks (telecommunications, computer, and Internet) supported over 200 million hours of connectivity every business day in 2000. The telecommunications networks are crucial for virtually all aspects of the infrastructures of most states, including their defense operations. In 2001 more than 95 percent of all internal communications by the U.S. Department of Defense went by means of the public switched network. Moreover, the pace of this increasing dependence was quickening.