with little useful warning, and anyhow with a merciless and unstoppable efficiency

with little useful warning, and anyhow with a merciless and unstoppable efficiency. Connected, surprising terrorism has cost trillions to fight; linked-up network businesses have demolished, surely and even gladly, trillions of dollars of old profit sources with their cold, clicking efficiency. Skype blitzes hundreds of billions of dollars of long distance telephone profits, for instance. And replaces it with free. Amazon, in the space of a few years, cripples marketplace ideas built at the cost of trillions of dollars. The world we're entering into now, one of constant, sensor-filled data streams that give us areal-time feeling for everything from the temperature of your car before you get in to the pace of your heart as you sleep, means the potent, network forces of our day are not “blind” as Morgenthau’s states were, but gifted with an exactness of vision. They see everything, always, more than we or our leaders do. They see it constantly. They never forget. Networks seem to have an irresistible and amazing energy that impels them to find and then exploit pin-holes. Think of Al-Qaeda coolly regarding the American airline network in 2000, for instance. Or rising powers now poking at weaknesses in the international order that we’ve not yet begun to consider, let alone patch up. Whether confronting mobs of network-organized terrorists or cascades of computer error, we often discover the unnerving truth that on these connected systems there is no plug to pull. Networks of one sort or another are hardly new in international affairs, even if the sheer scale and speed of our modern systems is totally, revolutionarily fresh. The spiderwebbed tendrils of the Ganges River, for instance were a network that fed the Mughal Empire in the 16 and 17" centuries.”* The Yangtze and the Yellow and the Mekong river systems each marked out vital webs that carried wealth and knowledge into a half-dozen, spectacularly rich Chinese dynasties. Egypt and Mesopotamia developed great powers that endured for centuries along the Nile and the Euphrates. Later, networks of trade overlaid the Mediterranean, which became the heart of the wealthy Carthaginian, Roman and Byzantine empires. And the greatest geographical empire in history, Great Britain, was nothing if not a network power, run on sea lines. Waterways, for centuries, pulsed with power. They were vital for trade, essential in war and crucial for national freedom. Network empires emerged on land too, assembled from connected webs of politics, of silk and tobacco and gold, or from shared religious passions. These sorts of networks, sometimes as thin as the trail of a single adventurer like Marco Polo, carried promises of prosperity (and intimations of violence) as they spread. Baron Antoin-Henry Jomini, Napoleon’s inspired tactical accomplice, was onto something when he remarked that it was the interior, networked lines of communication and logistics that had decided and delivered victory for history's great empires. “Methods change,” Jomini observed, “but principles are unchanging.” The skeins of links running inside national war machines were as essential for security as any 74 The spiderwebbed tendrils: Peter Turchin, “A theory for the formation of large agrarian empires”; Jean-Paul Rodrigue, Claude Comtois, and Brian Slack, The Geography of Transport Systems Routledge 2006 p. 10-15 54 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018286