Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 189

Asia Divides Over Trade Talks

The trade deal formerly known as Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is on life support after the U.S. withdrawal, but its remaining members still harbor hopes it can be saved. At a summit in Vietnam this past weekend, the Pacific Rim economies began talks on how that might happen, while searching for common ground with the Trump Administration.

It did not go well, Reuters :

Turmoil over global trade negotiations was laid bare at a meeting of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum, which failed to agree on its usual joint statement after U.S. opposition to wording on fighting protectionism. […]

New U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer said there was no way back and he believed there would be a series of bilateral agreements with countries in the region. […]

Although the TPP members kept the trade agreement alive, they fell short of a wholehearted commitment to advance immediately with a deal that members also see as a way to contain an increasingly dominant China.

“We’re focused on how we can move ahead with 11 countries,” New Zealand Trade Minister Todd McClay said.

One of the biggest challenges is keeping on board Vietnam and Malaysia, which signed up for the deal and promised to make major reforms largely to gain better U.S. market access.

It is easy to understand why some might sour on the idea of a post-Trump TPP: with the United States out of the picture, a downgraded deal would entail only one-quarter of the original volume of trade envisioned. And for countries like Vietnam and Malaysia, that level of trade simply may not be worth the painful reforms they must legislate to meet TPP’s labor and environmental standards.

That leaves an attractive opening for China to push its Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), a tariff-reduction deal that makes less stringent demands of its members. Not everyone is on board with China’s plan yet—India has been stubbornly refusing to budge on tariffs, and New Zealand has been downplaying expectations that RCEP could be negotiated this year—but that could change if TPP countries fail to resuscitate the deal.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration is leaving TPP members with no illusions. Lighthizer spent his first summit as Trade Representative declaring unequivocally that the U.S. would not rejoin the deal, while successfully fighting APEC members on the wording of an official statement that would have rejected protectionism. Given those clear signals, many in Asia may speedily accept the conclusion that the era of Washington-led multilateral trade deals is over—and that China’s alternatives are the only game in town.

Our No-Fault Russia Policy

Looming over both Moscow’s blatant intervention in the U.S. election and the Trump Administration’s continued struggle to develop a coherent Russia policy is the simple, but persistent question: Who lost Russia? How did Russia go from a fledgling democracy after the fall of the Soviet Union to the authoritarian bully we grapple with today?

Some blame Obama. Some blame George W. Bush. Some blame NATO expansion. Some blame the Washington Consensus, or insufficient aid during the 1990s. But these scapegoats all reflect classic American solipsism. In reality, nobody “lost” Russia; there is relatively little the U.S. government could have done to prevent the Kremlin’s revanchist course. Until we accept that truth, we’ll continue getting Russia policy wrong.

For one example of this blame game in action, look no further than President Trump, who recently tweeted: “For eight years Russia ‘ran over’ President Obama, got stronger and stronger, picked-off Crimea and added missiles. Weak!” More substantive critiques of U.S. policy point further back in time. Many Russia watchers blame Washington for playing midwife to Russia’s economic and political turmoil during 1990s—either by providing insufficient aid or, as Joseph Stiglitz has argued, saddling Russia with “shock therapy” capitalism. As a result, the argument goes, the ensuing chaos of the decade enabled the rise of Vladimir Putin in 2000 as an autocratic savior consumed by historical grievance and nationalist irredentism.

It’s true that economic turbulence and instability during the 1990s made Russia fertile ground for renewed autocracy. Not only does Putin himself cite the perceived humiliations of this decade as a justification for centralizing power; there is strong historical precedent for this kind of argument. The sense of humiliation and chaos in post-World War I Germany is widely credited with fueling Hitler’s rise, the bloodletting of the French Revolution led directly to Napoleon, and so on.

But the odds were that no amount of money, advice, or more “gradual” introduction of market mechanisms would have prevented the sclerotic, over-industrialized Soviet economy from making a chaotic transition to capitalism. Perhaps a better calibrated policy of aid and advice in the early-to-mid 1990s—when Russia’s trajectory was most malleable—could have helped set Russia on a different economic and political path. But the chances were always slim. Russia’s economic unwinding had already started during the 1980s. As Stephen Kotkin argues in Armageddon Averted, the 1990s should thus be seen as an extension of the long, tumultuous dissolution of the Soviet economic system unleashed by Mikhail Gorbachev. Besides, had the U.S. government provided more aid to soften this transition (for example, a chimeric “Marshall Plan” for Russia), none of our partners on the ground—the hapless President Boris Yeltsin and a corrupt suite of oligarchs—would have been either able or willing to wield it effectively.

And economic turmoil was only one aspect of the 1990s chaos. Another was a lack of security inside Russia: the wars in Chechnya, rampant organized crime, and a general sense of lawlessness. These combined forces (economic and security) served as powerful tailwinds for a return to dictatorship.

All of this said, while we may exaggerate U.S. influence over the economic and political behavior of a large and unwieldy power like Russia, it does not follow that nothing we do matters, for good or ill, in influencing the trajectory (and foreign policy) of other major countries. U.S. policy does have an impact at the margins, and in molten times, the margin is where the action is. The problem is that we cannot be sure when or where those opportunities are, so we do the best we can. In the case of Russia, the chaos of the 1980s and 1990s obscured our view of the tipping points and limited U.S. leverage in the face of powerful historical forces, so we shouldn’t beat ourselves up that Russia emerged from the 1990s as something other than a Western-style democracy.

Coming to terms with this reality is critical, for if we believe the deck was stacked in favor of Russia’s autocratic restoration, then we should not be surprised by Russia’s aggressive foreign policy either. There is a strong historical connection between Russia’s domestic insecurity and fear of disorder (which “necessitates” dictatorship), and its sense of geopolitical insecurity given the lack of natural barriers (which “necessitates” an expansionist foreign policy, in the name of preempting external attack).

Expansionism has been the norm from Ivan the Terrible (who gobbled up Siberia in the 16th century) to Catherine the Great (who annexed Crimea in the 18th century), all the way to Stalin (who expanded control over Central and Eastern Europe in the 20th century). Putin is channeling this history into his own expansionist vision, and specifically his desire to assert control over Russia’s “near abroad”—former Soviet “republics” such as Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova, and the Baltic States—as a buffer between Russia and its perceived enemies.

Moreover, foreign antagonism is critical to maintaining autocracy at home, helping to rally support for the regime and distract from its repressive politics and backward economics. Putin’s unfailing instinct to point the finger at the United States is the same mindset that George Kennan identified in the USSR in his seminal essay on “The Sources of Soviet Conduct” in 1947: “…[T]here is ample evidence that the stress laid in Moscow on the menace confronting Soviet society from the world outside its borders is founded not in the realities of foreign antagonism but in the necessity of explaining away the maintenance of dictatorial authority at home.”

Given these historical circumstances, what foreign policy would anyone expect from Putin—a nationalist with autocratic instincts, taking the reins after the turmoil of the 1990s—other than hostility toward the West and a desire to reassert control over the countries on his periphery?

Accepting the truth that U.S. policy was unlikely to prevent Russia’s revanchist trajectory undercuts another major critique of U.S. policy: that U.S.-led NATO expansion into Central and Eastern Europe—first in 1999, followed by a second round in 2004—provoked the bear to rage. Critics such as John Mearsheimer, for example, draw a direct line between Russia’s aggressive behavior today in Ukraine and elsewhere and the supposed original sin, and provocative effect, of moving NATO further east. But this argument has it backward. It assumes that external developments like NATO expansion had greater impact on the Kremlin’s foreign policy than Russia’s own domestic evolution.

In reality, it’s a good thing we expanded NATO when we did. Given Russia’s irredentist course, fueled by internal dynamics mostly outside of Western control, NATO expansion has ultimately served as a counterweight, not a catalyst, to Russian expansionism. It is no coincidence that once Russia regained its footing in the 2000s, it invaded two countries on its border that were not protected by NATO (Ukraine and Georgia), while leaving Poland and the Baltics (all NATO members) alone—at least so far.

A Central and Eastern Europe without NATO would probably also have been all the more explosive internally, given that these populations are not passive objects of their own histories. Like the thousands of Ukrainians who braved the cold in the Maidan in 2014, most of the liberated populations of Central and Eastern Europe understandably aspired to be part of a modern “West.” Without NATO as a shelter for such aspirations, they might have ended up on collision courses with Russia just as Ukraine did.

All of this history casts Trump’s argument about Obama’s “weakness” in a trivial light. For one thing, blaming Obama for Putin’s aggression inexplicably ignores the fact that Russia invaded Georgia in 2008 during the George W. Bush Administration. So intellectual honesty demands that, if Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was the result of Obama’s weakness, Bush’s weakness is to blame for Russian aggression as well.

But, more importantly, blaming Obama alone ignores the entirety of U.S.-Russian relations in the 2000s, during which a cautiously friendly initial relationship between Bush and Putin after 9/11 (over shared terrorism concerns) deteriorated into smoldering antagonism in the wake of the Iraq War and second round of NATO expansion. At the 2007 Munich Security Conference, Putin famously aired his grievances against U.S. policy, and at the 2008 NATO Summit in Bucharest, Putin laid bare his view of Ukraine as nothing more than a Russian vassal, reportedly telling Bush that “Ukraine is not even a country.” You can argue that Obama should have taken a tougher line on Russia to deter Putin, but the Kremlin’s antagonistic worldview—and even Putin’s specific designs on Ukraine—was fully formed before anybody in Moscow had even heard of Barack Obama.

Moving beyond this finger-pointing is critical to getting our Russia policy right going forward. Blaming ourselves for either provoking Russia into belligerence or failing to be tough enough with the Kremlin warps the current debate, pushing one side into grasping at an illusory “grand bargain” with Russia in order to ease tensions while the other side competes to win the grand prize for “toughest line against Moscow.” This see-sawing policy debate only serves to confuse our allies and Russian counterparts as to our intentions.

Instead, we should accept continued antagonism from the Kremlin for the foreseeable future and develop a clear, consistent, level-headed response that works constructively where our interests might overlap, but stands up firmly where our core interests (including European security and the independence of countries along Russia’s periphery) are involved. And we shouldn’t sacrifice these core interests in return for some vague promise of “cooperation,” or warmer relations for sake of “getting along” (as Trump likes to say).

Indeed, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson told us lately, upon his return from Moscow, that relations are now at a low point. But this shouldn’t compel us to rash action. If we try to make a note of areas of cooperation with Russia that are both significant and available, the result is a very short list (limited intelligence sharing on terrorism, bare-bones cooperation in Syria, and what else?). The assumption that poor relations must somehow be our fault—and hence we must rush to do something about it—is wrongheaded and counterproductive.

Putin is adept at feeling out his adversaries’ vulnerabilities and taking bold action to exploit them. He is a master at employing Lenin’s dictum: “Probe with bayonets. If you encounter mush, proceed; if you encounter steel, withdraw.” Moving forward, he will continue to “probe” where he can, causing difficulties for the West and requiring us to meet his advances with “steel.”

From bolstering Ukrainian forces to greater protection for the Baltic States to tougher sanctions against Russian leaders, we shouldn’t doubt our own power to contain and counter Russian bullying. But let’s not blame ourselves for getting us here.

ISIS Claims Attack in Manchester

ISIS has claimed responsibility for the terrorist attack at a concert in Manchester, England. As the New York Times reports:

The Islamic State claimed responsibility on Tuesday for the bombing at Manchester Arena, the deadliest terrorist assault in Britain since 2005, as the death toll rose to 22.

The bomb tore through an entrance hall of the 21,000-seat Manchester Arena at about 10:30 p.m. on Monday as a concert by the American pop star Ariana Grande was ending and as crowds of teenagers had begun to leave, many for an adjacent train station.

Pandemonium ensued, as panicked adolescents struggled to connect with parents and guardians waiting outside to pick them up. As well as those killed, dozens of other people were wounded in the attack; 59 were hospitalized, some with life-threatening injuries.

The police said that they were canvassing leads and poring over surveillance footage to determine if the assailant — who died in the assault — had acted with any accomplices. Shortly before noon on Tuesday, the police announced that they had arrested a 23-year-old man southwest of the city center “with regards to last night’s incident,” but they did not provide additional details.

This attack should clarify President Trump’s speech to the newly opened “Global Center for Combatting Extremist Ideology” in Riyadh over the weekend. The fact is, when it comes to attacks in and against the West, the threat is not necessarily exported from the war zones of Syria or the glitzy cities of the Persian Gulf. It is festering in the banlieues of Paris and among immigrant communities in cities like Manchester.

Consequently, extirpating ISIS from its strongholds in Iraq and Syria will not defeat its ideology of terror. On the contrary, as would-be ISIS fighters have been prevented from joining the Caliphate, their leaders are encouraging them to carry out attacks at home in the West.

There are 22 people, many of them children, who are now dead because of a vicious ideology that holds an innocent children’s concert as tantamount to crusade. Most Americans became familiar with this kind of hatred on September 11th. 16 years later, the end remains far out of sight.

The Noose Tightens in Brazil

Brazilian President Michel Temer is still standing his ground after last week’s bombshell bribery revelation, but the pressure is mounting, and the momentum for his economic reform drive is stalling. FT: 

Blindsided by a scandal in which an executive of Brazilian meatpacker, JBS, secretly taped a conversation that showed the president allegedly endorsed bribe paying, Mr Temer is burnishing his reformist credentials amid growing calls for his impeachment.

“Brazil will not go off the rails,” he said during an address in which he rejected the allegations and claimed the tape had been doctored. “We are completing the reforms to modernise the Brazilian state. My government is going in the right direction.” […]

In a signal that he is digging in for a protracted fight, Mr Temer told newspaper Folha de S. Paulo that he would not resign even if he was indicted.

But if Mr Temer was forced to resign or was impeached, congress would choose a stopgap president to serve out the rest of the current term, which ends in 2018. Many are calling for snap elections but this would require difficult constitutional changes.

To lose one President to a corruption scandal may be regarded as a misfortune. To lose two in a row begins to look like carelessness.

The leadership crisis is both an internal problem for Brazil—where important reforms to its destructive pension system may well fail thanks to the latest Presidential scandal—as well as an international issue. As Venezuela edges toward a total breakdown with the potential of civil unrest and even civil war, a strong and calm Brazilian presence on the scene could help resolve things while keeping the U.S. in the background. That would be good for everyone. But a divided Brazil, turning inward and dealing with yet another outbreak of scandal, cannot play that role.

On the other hand, if the Lava Jato (Car Wash) scandal has shown us anything, it is that the political class in Brazil is rotten to the core, and that more and more Brazilians are sick of it. Inconvenient as it may be, it’s important that Brazil continue to hammer away at the corruption of its government, parties, and state-aligned companies.

OPEC’s Iraq Problem

OPEC is nearing the end of a six-month agreement to cut its collective production (along with 11 other non-member petrostates) to try and cut away at the global glut of crude and kick off a price rebound, but not all of its members are adhering to the plan. The UAE and Venezuela both missed their cut targets, but as Bloomberg reports, Iraq was the worst offender:

Iraq pumped about 80,000 more barrels of oil a day than permitted by Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries curbs during the first quarter. If that deal gets extended to 2018, the nation will have even less incentive to comply because capacity at key southern fields is expanding and three years of fighting Islamic state has left it drowning in debt. […]

“I doubt Iraq will cut any more in the second half than it has already,” said Robin Mills, the Dubai-based chief executive officer of consultant Qamar Energy. It may instead produce more as it completes maintenance at several fields, new ones start production and seasonal domestic consumption rises, he said. There are some signs this has already started.

80,000 barrels per day isn’t much in the grand scheme of things (the petrostate cut plan reduced supply by roughly 1.2 million barrels per day), but it could get worse in the coming months as Iraq’s capacity increases. But this isn’t just a substantive problem—to the extent that it sends a signal to other petrostates that it’s alright to break ranks, it’s a symbolic one as well:

A risk, though, emerges if Iraqi compliance worsens to such an extent that other countries in the 13-member group start cutting corners too, exacerbating a global surplus that’s already erased much of the gains that unfolded after the deal was struck in November.

The Saudis are the only player capable of offsetting this non-compliance by increasing their own cuts, but Riyadh already has its hands full leading this clash between conventional state-run oil producers and upstart, non-conventional suppliers (read: U.S. shale firms). The last thing the Saudis need right now is a scab, but that’s the role Iraq seems intent on playing in this high-stakes drama, and it seems likely things will get worse if and when OPEC & co. agree to extend cuts through March on Wednesday.

The Suburbs Are Still Where It’s At

Contrary to the hopeful prognostications of “new urbanists,” who said that Americans would move en masse to dense city centers, rent rather than buy, take eco-friendly public transit to work, American suburbs are booming. The big house, big car lifestyle is still the middle-class American way for raising a family and creating wealth. The New York Times reports:

Be skeptical when you hear about the return to glory of the American city — that idealized vision of rising skyscrapers and bustling, dense downtowns. Contrary to perception, the nation is continuing to become more suburban, and at an accelerating pace. The prevailing pattern is growing out, not up, although with notable exceptions.

Rural areas are lagging metropolitan areas in numerous measures, but within metro areas the suburbs are growing faster in both population and job growth.

The post-recession urban boom was in part a product of the stimulus and low interest rates and millennials’ inability to make down payments. But now that millennials are starting to get married and make more money and enter the housing market, the demand for suburban living is increasing. Meanwhile, telecommuting, Amazon, and low energy prices make suburban living more convenient and less expensive. Our regulatory and infrastructure planning policies should reflect the centrality of suburbs in American life, rather than trying to shoehorn a new generation into an eco-friendly urbanist utopia.

Pressure Grows for Trump to Stay in Paris

CEO of the oil supermajor Royal Dutch Shell Ben van Beurden is the latest (perhaps surprising) executive to lend his voice to the corporate chorus that’s putting pressure on the Trump administration to stay in the Paris climate deal that the Obama White House signed off on back in December of 2015. The FT reports:

Mr van Beurden broke ranks with chief executives who have been reluctant to challenge the US president publicly by declaring that Mr Trump’s pledge to abandon the Paris accord would be self-defeating.

“It would be unhelpful on a number of fronts,” he told the Financial Times at the Washington office of the Anglo-Dutch oil company, already an avowed supporter of the Paris deal.

“With the US being the largest investment destination for a company like Shell, yes, I think I would regret having a lot of business here that potentially could be at a disadvantage because of [the] implications of that decision to pull out of Paris.”

Amy Harder took a look at corporate America’s support for the Paris deal in a column for Axios last month that’s worth another look if you missed it. In it, she looks at the different reasons why many of the country’s biggest companies are coming out in support of staying in the Paris agreement, including many in the fossil fuel industry. She explains why Exxon Mobil wrote to the White House in March urging Trump not to pull out of Paris:

Major oil companies, like ExxonMobil and Royal Dutch Shell, have increasingly invested in natural gas, which emits 50% less carbon than coal when burned. Companies with big natural gas portfolios will gain with climate policies that accelerate a shift already underway to replace coal with natural gas.

But by far the biggest reason these companies want to see the U.S. stay in the Paris agreement has to do with how little that agreement affects their bottom line. This climate “treaty” lacks any sort of enforcement mechanisms, and doesn’t legally bind the United States to our emissions targets (targets which we set for ourselves). Why lose one’s seat at the table and endure the poor optics that are going to come with that when America could simply stay in Paris and continue doing business as usual?

That sort of thinking resonates on the Hill, as well—Republican Congressman Fred Upton, chair of the energy subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce committee, said in a podcast recently that he has no problem with America’s participation in the Paris deal “because there was no mandate.”

There’s no small amount of irony to unpack in the fact that the most persuasive argument greens could make to convince President Trump to stay in the Paris agreement is the very argument we—and many others—were making against that deal in the first place: the Paris deal is unenforceable, and is therefore pure window dressing. It wasn’t worth the effort and time that went into producing it in the first place, but now that we’re here, we lose nothing by staying in it.

Piracy on the Cyber Seas

The massive ransomware attack of May 12 made news for a few days and then, like Andy Warhol’s 15-minutes of fame, dropped pretty much out of the mainstream press ambit. This is understandable, perhaps, since this episode of a ransomware attack was noteworthy for only two reasons: It was much grander than all its precursors, which go back at least to 2012; and it made use for the first time of NSA tools purloined last summer by a shadowy group called, appropriately enough, the Shadow Brokers.

Otherwise, most would-be victims refused to pay, and Microsoft gave out free patches to spread protection and protect its own bottom line. The damage seems to have been fairly limited in part because the perpetrators failed to set up a payment flow in a clean and timely manner, and because almost no bank will convert Bitcoin to cash. Besides, much of the damage seems to have occurred in China, where more vulnerable bootlegged software is ubiquitous: serves the thieving bastards right.

So, all’s fairly well that ends fairly well? Not so fast. The bad guys are still at large, whether they are common criminals or virtually armed anarchists seeking to tank the “system”—and we don’t yet know which. Maybe both. The Shadow Brokers are probably Russia-backed goons one or two or three degrees of separation removed from Russian intelligence, but they seem not to have been running the extortion attempt. As soon as the Shadow Brokers dumped the NSA tools, this sort of thing was inevitable. Yet as amateurish as the second-echelon hackers seem to have been—whether plain criminality of politically inflected criminality was the motive—that doesn’t mean they’ll be easy to catch or deter, or that other hackers won’t try similar things. So as a generic problem, this is not even close to being over.

Distinguishing simple criminal from political criminal motives is not easy, and never has been—but it is important. And the reason is that during its short period of fame, no one identified the ransomware event in its proper historical category. Many observers referred to “extortion” and others less specifically to “theft.” Those terms are not wrong but they miss the essence: This was an act of piracy, piracy on the cyberseas.

To miss this obvious insight, one has to be asking inadequate questions. As the late and very great British anthropologist Mary Douglas once wrote, “Information is simply not going to rub off on someone who is never going to make use of it.”1 What use should we be making of the ransomware incident? What questions should it pose?

Some of the answers come clear if we recall the definition and some of the history of piracy. In his 2009 book, The Enemy of All: Piracy and the Law of Nations, Daniel Heller-Roazen of Princeton University provides as good a definition as we need. Piracy, he reminds us, emerges from a conjunction of four conditions: It occurs in a region beyond territorial jurisdiction; its agents are not identified with an established state; it obfuscates or collapses the distinction between criminal and political categories; and it transforms the concept of war by ignoring all its framework assumptions and explicit rules (to the extent there are any).

The pirate, as all international legal experts know, is the original enemy of humankind: hostis humani generis. The concept is usually attributed to Cicero, who famously remarked that, while there are certain enemies with whom one may negotiate and with whom, circumstances permitting, one may establish a truce, there are others with whom treaties are in vain and war remains incessant. The Latin phrase, however, seems to be the early modern coinage of the nearly-as-famous English jurist Edward Coke (1552-1634).

No matter. The definition in modern times has been extended from pirates to terrorists—and, by some, to torturers as well. But again, as was the case with pirates back in the day (or to Somali pirates around the Horn of Africa much more recently), disentangling those who are irreconcilably but simply criminal from those with a political axe to grind isn’t easy. In the 17th century, for example, some people’s pirates were other people’s privateers—ask some Spanish and English ghosts if you don’t believe me, or just read up on Sir Francis Drake. And today, some people’s terrorists are said (wrongly) to be other people’s freedom fighters. And yes, now some people’s malware criminals are said to be anarchist heroes trying to destroy global capitalism, allegedly a sinister system perpetrating massive inequality and other forms of “structural violence.”

The point in all cases is that the “pirate” rejects the principle of the system of norms that enables law and order to serve all. That is why, as Heller-Roazen explains it, the pirate in legal and political thought from the ancient to the medieval, modern, and contemporary periods embodies the idea of a universal foe—a legal and political person of exception, neither clearly criminal nor enemy, who inhabits an extra-territorial region—against whom states may wage extraordinary battles, policing politics and justifying military measures in the name of the general welfare and security of the commons.

Heller-Roazen argues that the paradigm of piracy remains in force. He clearly has terrorism in mind, defined as “indiscriminate aggression” committed “against humanity.” When I invited him to extend his thinking to encompass ransomware culprits, he acknowledged the applicability but begged off the task, claiming he knew too little about the software. (I answered that he was maybe missing the point, but it did no good; so here I’m trying to do what he probably could do better. Again, no matter.)

So why exactly was the May 12 piratical attack so important, so much more deserving that the “15 minutes” of mainstream press coverage it has gotten? Because it illuminates the four conditions of piracy the attack fit so well. It shows, simply put, how the massive disintermediation and hyperconnectivity afforded by the cybernetic revolution threaten the order of the commons we have—in other words, how it threatens the raison d’être of the Westphalian state and state system with it.

Before getting to the four “fitted” conditions of the May 12 attack, allow please a very short description in the context of both disintermediation and hyperconnectivity, as seen together.

Disintermediation means the dismantling of buffering structures between individuals and between individuals and institutions, including governments. Relatively benign examples include AirBnB, Uber, ATMs, “smart” gas pumping machines, online travel sites, and we can obviously go on and on. But hackers-cum-pirates, too, can strip out all the intermediate structures that used to separate an individual’s or a company’s proprietary information sets from malicious agents wishing to steal, destroy, distort, or fake-and-transmit that information for any of several nefarious purposes. It is also why, in an age of electronic medical records, laws have had to be passed to protect those records from theft and manipulation, it’s why identity theft is a growing criminal problem, and again we could go on.

If disintermediation allows bad guys to surgically target victims as never before, from anywhere on the planet, hyperconnectivity enables them to multiply their targets simultaneously by many orders of magnitude. If there are something like 700 million iPhones on the planet now—never mind other brands, laptops, or personal computers—and if any iPhone can transact with any other smartphone, that yields about 2.45 x 1017 potential connections. As ought to be obvious, numbers like these mean that a ransomware attack that exploits a flaw in iPhone software can spread very widely, very quickly, to hundreds of millions of smartphone users. And we are likely just at the beginning of a process whereby such numbers will not only be achieved but surpassed. If cyberpirates collect even very small ransoms from just 1 percent of connected victims, that’s still an enormous amount of potential loot.

Condition 1: Back in the days of Sir Francis Drake and Blackbeard, the high seas were effectively beyond territorial jurisdiction, meaning the jurisdiction of early-modern states. By the 1970s, so was outer space beyond the effective jurisdiction of nearly all states. Today, so is cyberspace. The problem is that, as far as everyday human transactions are concerned—commercial, cultural, and others—we nations and peoples of the world are coming to depend on cyberspace as a commons far more than our forbears did on space or even the high seas. So screwing around with the use of that commons, whether for criminal or political purposes, is very tempting. Too tempting, because getting caught is still improbable because of jurisdictional friction and punishments, if caught, are not draconian enough to deter opportunists.

Condition 2: As for agents being beyond identification with a territorial state, that is a status easier than ever to achieve. Yes, nearly everyone is a national of some UN member, so in legal theory the question of jurisdiction is not manifestly more complex than it was three hundred years ago. But hyperconnectivity enables the creation of neo-tribes based on affinity like no time in the past. It is easier to be a non-national citizen of the world today than ever. It is easier to be an anarchist, therefore, than ever, and to get away with anarchist sabotage not by assassinating world leaders—as was so popular a century or so ago—but by assassinating the operating system on which all national leaders and corporate managers increasingly depend.

Condition 3: As for obfuscating or causing to collapse the distinction between the criminal and the political, ransomware attackers illustrate a piling-on to the twin attack on the state ably described in the pages of The American Interest by Nils Gilman. In his 2014 essay, “The Twin Insurgency,” he shows how criminals and plutocrats unwittingly (for the most part) reinforce each other’s attack on the state, each creating forms of porosity the other can walk right through. We may now imagine a triple insurgency, adding modern political pirates to the mix. If it turns out, as I suspect is likely, that many would-be piratical hackers have a political agenda akin to the other well-known transparency saints of our time—Assange, Snowden, Manning—then we will see the concept of hostis humani generis come alive yet again before our very eyes.

Condition 4: At a time of massive disintermediation and hyperconnectivity, we are still trying to work out the implications not just for war as we have known it, but also for related concepts like security, deterrence, and even peace. The basic issue is the new problematics of the platform, both political and operational.

Since at least 1648, the unit of measure has been the state, the idea being that if the state could defend itself it could also defend the people within it. That has never been completely the case, but it was close enough for government work when the only borders were horizontal ones. Then aircraft, starting in 1911, could be agents of death for soldiers and civilians alike even if land borders remained secure. Space operations, in theory at least, created a third dimension of vulnerability—let’s call it orbital/circular in addition to horizontal and vertical—in the latter part of the 20th century. And now, in the 21st, we are witness to a fourth dimension, virtual borders in cyberspace.

As each dimension got added over time, the efficacy of the state to manage the implements and environment of war declined, radically so in this new four-dimensional condition. States still remain arguably the most important actors, but the share of variance they cannot effectively control is rising before the twinned tides of disintermediation and hyperconnectivity. That means that the rules of protocol they propound mean less and less as time passes, for increasingly powerful agents not party to membership are proliferating. That represents a conceptual change in war (and related core concepts), especially at a time when private multinational (or at any rate psychologically de-nationalized) corporations are spending a lot more research and development dollars than are governments. What if some private corporation perfects the use of nanotech distributed systems to defend and/or attack human populations before any state does? Will we find ourselves in a yet unwritten chapter of Diamond Age? We frankly have no idea where we will find ourselves.

I hold no brief for transparency saints, but the territorial state is under increasing stress as a viable unit regardless of their antics. This is not, or ought not be, new news. Hedley Bull posed a prospect of the return of medievalism in his 1977 book The Anarchic Society, and disquisitions from different perspectives on the growing vulnerability, or impotence, of the territorial state have not since surceased.2 Some observers have liked the prospect, others not, depending on how they reckon nationalism; still others have tried to hew to the scientific ideal and just describe what they have seen. Yet again, no matter: It is what is it, and the basic reason is clear enough if we just one more time repair to definition—this time of the state.

What does a state have to do to be, and to endure, as a state? It has to do five things.

First, it has to control its territory, which means controlling all agents within it in order to ensure the more or less smooth continuation of ordinary life. This obviously means people, and for that purpose all states have laws and means of enforcing laws; but it also means controlling borders from outsider individuals or armies who would enter unlawfully (national defense), and it means, in theory at least, controlling pathogens that might destroy society (public health), or any other kind of agent that might threaten to do so (extreme scenarios of climate change, perhaps).

Second, a state must obviate civil war, which means it must maintain a monopoly of violence. The origins of the state have to do with a primordial exchange: powerful propertied people (nobles, say) gave up their independent means of coercion (knights in private hire, say) in return for a sovereign agreeing to respect (not expropriate at will) property. That means that competition for wealth and power, which, human nature being what it is, cannot be obviated, must obey rules established by the sovereign, lest factions war upon one another within a defined territory for economic or other reasons. When the sovereign is normatively the people, then a constitution embodies a more or less democratic political system that supplies the same function as long ago did an absolute ruler—a king, a sultan, or what-have-you.

Third, a state must modulate and manage exchanges. Beyond literal defense and security, states establish rules for commerce within and without, and to do that most endeavor to provide some kind of legal and literal infrastructure (courts to adjudicate disputes within, ports and border crossings and customs facilities to facilitate exchanges across frontiers). Without some order to weights and measures, normal life would be too chaotic for any commons. And as all but lighter-than-air libertarians know, all economic activity is based on political frameworks of one kind or another; even “private property” is, after all, a political concept.

Fourth, a state has to finance its own operations. Charles Tilly brilliantly theorized that regime types are partly based on the path-dependency legacies of how different states managed to fund themselves.3 Yet however the go about it, they must go about it successfully.

Fifth, a state must provide for its own continuity beyond its mortal human agents of by having an established means of leadership succession. This means differs, obviously, in different kinds of regimes—monarchy from democracy, and every form in between. But states cannot dissolve or fall to civil war every time a leader passes from the scene and still be a viable state.

Now consider briefly what ransomware piracy events on the scale witnessed earlier this month, and prospectively much larger and more efficacious such events in future, mean in this regard for the five necessary functions of a state:

Such events diminish state control over what matters in a territory.
They threaten to give rise to forms of competition the state cannot bring to heel in a court.
They undermine the management of lawful exchanges.
To the extent their piracy succeeds, it levies what amounts to a tax on resources that the state cannot prevent and that competes, a little or potentially a lot, with the state’s own capacity to raise revenue to sustain itself.
And in theory they could interfere in political succession processes. After all, if states can hack each other’s elections, there is no reason that private actors—political pirates—cannot do the same. This would be not exactly the same as espionage, which Annette Dulzin once described as being to politics what infidelity is to marriage; it would be more like an international political orgy, serial and simultaneous infidelity to the protocols of relations among states.

There is something to be said for anarchy. James C. Scott has recently raised Two Cheers for Anarchism (2012) and, for that matter, Abdullah Öcalan declared the late Murray Bookchin’s anarchist theory of “municipal federalism” the official ideology of the PKK. As a died-in-the-wool anti-statist myself from many years ago—in college I once took umbrage at someone calling Pjotr Krapotkin a “crackpot-tin”—I have some sympathy with this view.4 I also have some real, matured, practicality-dictated problems with it (hence my view of Assange, Snowden, Manning et al.).

But we do have a massive potential governance problem on our hands: The ambit of the territorial state’s political control over the actual extent of human transactions, commercial and cultural, aligns less and less with reality in the age of onrushing disintermediation and hyperconnectivity. Something has got to give, and indeed, is already giving. So we need somehow to realign the political with the transactional in a way that preserves democratic accountability as well as, more importantly perhaps, human dignity, autonomy, and a chance to create meaningful work and play.

Now, some people see the so-called populist reaction against globalization, and its handmaiden ideology globalism, as the harbinger of a resuscitation of benign and hopefully liberal nationalism. Given what the ransomware episode of piracy on the cyberseas shows us about the real “state” of affairs, quite a surprise probably awaits such folks. Thanks to what has gone forward with the technology of globalization’s newest era, there is now no going back.

But that’s fine. The truth is that nationalist sentiment at its 19th and early 20th century heights rarely reposed much emotion in the symbols of the nation or the associated nation-state, except among a tiny bunch of intellectuals. Most people have valued literal community—neighborhood, village, town—much more nationalist abstractions, and still do. The challenge, then, revealed by the advent of piracy on the cyberseas is to knit together a skein of functional relationships that preserve the social capital inherent in community but that find a way as well to manage the larger governance requirements necessary to protect those communities from harm and even destruction in a dangerous world. Isn’t that question worth more than 15 minutes of our attention?

1“Governability: A Question of Culture,” Millennium (Winter 1992).

2One even preceded Bull: Richard J. Barnet and Ronald E. Müller’s Global Reach: The Power of Multinational Corporations (1974); and note Saskia Sassen, Losing Control: Sovereignty in an Age of Globalization (1996) and her Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages (2006).

3See for example Charles Tilly, “Grudging Consent,” The American Interest (September/October 2007).

4Case in point: See my “A New Pioneer Act,” National Affairs (Winter 2016-17).

Elite Boarding Schools Become Snowflake Factories

The SAT has been falling out of fashion for years now, with a growing number of colleges going “test-optional” and the College Board continuously “redesigning” the test to make it easier. Now grades may be following suit. Chester Finn of the Fordham Institute, an education think tank, writes about the effort at ritzy boarding schools to replace grades with platitudinous written assessments for each student:

A novel but truly nutty idea is now gaining adherents in the high-priced private-school sector, including such eminences as Dalton and Andover. A founding group of one hundred of them—dubbing itself the Mastery Transcript Consortium—has set out to eliminate the high-school transcript and the pupil grades that go onto it, seeking instead to press colleges (and presumably employers and graduate schools) to evaluate their applicants holistically, basing those judgments on subjective reviews of the skills and competencies that individual pupils are said to have acquired during high school.

The official rationale for the effort is to recognize the “unique” abilities of each student that supposedly can’t be captured with grades. But as Finn points out, there is a market incentive as well: Ultra-rich parents might be more willing to drop $50,000 per year tuitions if they are more confident their children’s academic weaknesses will be papered over by such qualitative criteria as the ability to “leverage social and cultural differences to create new ideas and achieve success.”

As with the diminishment of the SAT, these changes are sold with feel-good liberal language about recognizing differences and treating everyone fairly. In fact, objective measures like grades and test scores have long been a way for smart young people not already in the upper-class to give elites a run for their money. Without these tools, the talentless but privileged are even more impervious to competition from below.

China Dismantled CIA Network on Obama’s Watch

The New York Times offered a deeply disturbing scoop over the weekend: from 2010 to 2012, Beijing effectively demolished a deep network of CIA spies within China, with a spate of killings and jailings that dealt a devastating blow to our intel capabilities. More:

Current and former American officials described the intelligence breach as one of the worst in decades. It set off a scramble in Washington’s intelligence and law enforcement agencies to contain the fallout, but investigators were bitterly divided over the cause. Some were convinced that a mole within the C.I.A. had betrayed the United States. Others believed that the Chinese had hacked the covert system the C.I.A. used to communicate with its foreign sources. Years later, that debate remains unresolved.

But there was no disagreement about the damage. […]

All told, the Chinese killed or imprisoned 18 to 20 of the C.I.A.’s sources in China, according to two former senior American officials, effectively unraveling a network that had taken years to build.

The Times story offers further evidence of what has long been apparent: whether through neglect or mismanagement, the Obama administration presided over a series of breaches of American security that were astounding in their depth and damage. From the ruinous revelations by WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden to malicious Chinese and Russian hacking to the decimation of foreign intelligence sources, Obama’s track record on safeguarding national security was truly a dismal one.

Obviously, these breaches were not all Obama’s fault; in the China case, the first-order fault lies with the sloppy spycraft or vetting failures that enabled such a massive exposure of U.S. assets. But whatever work was being done behind the scenes to whip a bloated intelligence bureaucracy into shape, President Obama never seemed deeply engaged with the issue, nor did he make a major public priority out of fixing it. Had a Republican president been in charge during this time, the press would be pounding the drum of failure and incompetence non-stop.

Will President Trump be able to right the ship? He clearly needs to. But the President’s constant broadsides against a leaky national security bureaucracy have led to unprecedented levels of mistrust on both sides. With red hot rhetoric flying and fingers being pointed every other day, it’s hard to imagine that anyone will be able to take a considered big picture look at what’s gone wrong over the past few years. And with the world as dangerous as it is these days, taking a sledgehammer to the whole bureaucracy—the “drain the swamp” reflex that still motivates Trump and energizes his supporters—might not be the wisest approach.