Terrorism, we have to understand, is merely one example of network danger and

Terrorism, we have to understand, is merely one example of network danger and power. So is China. And Russia. And these may not even be the most dangerous or devastating network battles that will take place in our lives. It’s a commonplace to say now that the international system is in the greatest period of upheval in more than half a century. But often this sort of remark is accompanied by a list of moving pieces that seem to be unconnected: China’s rise, the return of Russia, changes in the Middle East, globalization and then reverse globalization. “Who would have thought the post Cold War era, which was supposed to be characterized by ‘softpower’ and economic interdependence would be so violent?”®* one team of scholars recently wrote, reflecting the genuine wonderment of many “experts” who failed to predic the end of the Cold War and then, largely, the nature of what has come after. Who would have thought? Well, as we'll see, anyone who understands networks. Thomas Hobbes - the 16 century British philosopher long considered an early master of the analysis of cold, brutal power - once put it simply enough: Nations, he said, need to be mastered. “During the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war,” he wrote. “Such a war as is of every man against every man.”°’ A precondition of peace, for Hobbes, was that some country or force or tribe decisively grips a region, an empire, even the globe. “A common power to keep them all in awe,” fulfilled a need for order. In our connected age, the common, awesome power is already here. It is networks. The battle now is for and on of this genuinely historic, still curious force. They will be attacked, throttled, trashed, accelerated, used, upgraded, won and lost and inflicted on each of us and our security by those with a new sensibility. To feel the world with a Seventh Sense will reveal a whole new landscape of power; it will permit us to see the fibers of a new age and then weave them into how we see and think and, finally, act. That essential, decisive terrain of our new age is, to the “Smart Power” and “Don’t Come Home” crowd, still largely invisible and, anyhow, incomprehensible. 7. Just as rivers or mountains or air currents drove commerce and combat in past eras, networks will strongly, probably decisively, influence the dynamics ahead. Today you can’t, after all, operate on the rivers or mountains or in the skies or space without lively, near-instant connection. The space these interlocking networks occupy represents a new geography. It is growing every day, as if it were a giant new continent fusing together under the surface of the sea. We are, as the team at Gee! Do! discovered, moving from a world in which nations battled nations to one in which nations battle networks. And a world where networks battle networks. In coming years, networks will surely break nations, as once nations broke each other. It is linked the systems of trade and economics and biology and data that will create 66 “Who would have thought”: Robert Hutchings and Jeremi Suri, Foreign Policy Breakthroughs: Cases in Successful Diplomacy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015) p. 2 67 “During the time”: Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, (Cambridge University Press, 2002) 88, 51 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018283