So we should say it coldly: We have, as of yet, no strategy. We have no shared

So we should say it coldly: We have, as of yet, no strategy. We have no shared picture of the world as it might be. You. Me. Our leaders. None of us. And the experience of other, fast-collapsed empires should way on us. “The struggle to survive,” the historian John Darwin has written of the British Empire, “was waged in an age of revolution: a Eurasian revolution that cumulatively (but very quickly) destroyed almost all the global preconditions on which the British system had depended since the 1830s.” So in our age. Many of the essential determinants of American power are being revolutionized by new, connected forces. The world syste will change in coming years. Our only question is will the changes reduce us as they once shrunk Britain, or will we draw on them to establish a longer, more durable system. At the moment, in a time of fascinating explosions of ideas and insights and connection, the American foreign policy approach is deeply and strangely unplugged from these risks and possibilities. The world has changed - is changing profoundly - from the one in which most students and practitioners of international affairs were educated. And here’s the reality: Nothing can stop this change. The last two decades have brought massive and persuasive change in so many disciplines. And in foreign policy? In the consideration of problems of war and peace which, if not handled properly will rain tragedy on every other effort we might have in mind? Not much has changed. Except this: A growing sentiment of pessimism that suggests maybe America can’t hold on. Great powers get one century to rule, the logic goes, and America’s is now up. It’s not merely that we lack a “China Strategy” or a “Middle East Strategy”, it’s that we've failed to discern an overall grand strategy that would produce a coherent answer to the question of what to do about China or the Middle East - to say nothing of how those forces might be played off another with clever diplomatic harmony like instruments in a symphony. It is hard to know if this puzzlement represents a failure of imagination or of nerve. Does it mark arrogance or confusion? Or just an ignorance of the profound, revolutionary nature of the forces now at work? Today when leading officials remark that their main concern is a rising China or revanchist Russia or that we live in a world where, as Secretary of State John Kerry said, “terrorism is the principal challenge,” they are missing the point. The fundamental threat to American interests isn’t China or Al Qaeda or Iran. It is the evolution of the network itself. Constructed of switches, chips, data, code, exploits, sensors, AI bots, financial instruments, trade, currency and more, the network is itself a weapons system. Its architecture, a wonderfully humming maze of change and contagion and instability, determines its terrifying dangers and marks its vast opportunities®. It touches - decisively - each and any particular problem we would care to name. 64 “The struggle to survive”: John Darwin, The Empire Project, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009) 477 65 Its architecture: For an excellent overview on the politics of contagion, see Tony D. Sampson, Virality, (University of Minnesota Press, 2012) 50 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018282