change, lock in great-state peace. So many desires scatter our minds and when we

change, lock in great-state peace. So many desires scatter our minds and when we fail to achieve them they erode our will. Here is a basic lesson of accomplishment in any human domain: Better for us to focus on a single aim, and tighten our efforts around that one aim and use success to strengthen our will. The answer to the great, newly-charged existential question of politics - “Are you a gatekeeper or the gatekept?” - is not yet decided for the United States. So, strategy first: We live ina connected age where power is sliding into that gated order we've learned about. America’s role? Not to make the entire world democratic. Not to try to bomb or force stability onto every nation now collapsing under network pressures. Not to passively wait for our version of history to “win”. Not to thwart the rise of other countries. No. The strategy that fits the nature of our age and position is to perfect and then operate the essential, topological mechanisms of power now. Sometimes with warm humanity; other times with the ruthlessness demanded by the touch of danger and evil. This involves gates. It involves firmness and nerve and willpower. It demands what we might call Hard Gatekeeping. 2. Everything around us now is or soon will be connected. Access to our trade, the use of technology and networks, our defense or our currency - all of these must be considered as gated systems. Each will come to throb with new power as a result of their links, as a byproduct of their escalating sensitivity, intelligence and power, and from that in-or-out distinction. Much remains to be instantly, fully linked in this way. Our education. Our medicine. Our military. Real-time information, sensors and machine intelligence will erect Gatelands in each of these areas and in others. These walls will go up even faster than real-world berms and fences. The strategic position of any nation or terror group or business is not going to be secured by industrial measures. No one at Google wants to build a newspaper. No one in Al-Qaeda is trying to float an aircraft carrier. Rather, it will be determined in the construction of new tools, which largely means the building of a new, gated order. “Every new age and every new epoch in the coexistence of peoples,” the historian Carl Schmitt once wrote, “is founded on new spatial divisions, new enclosures, and new spatial orders of the earth.” Schmitt was contemplating history: The great Mediterranean empires and the long, millennial power trails of Asian chieftains. But his insight touches every age, our own included. To make a nation, to build an empire, is to draw lines, to push at borders, to smash at gates. Some of this is the wild martial ambition of a Napoleon or Hitler (who Schmitt unwisely advised); often itis simple protection. Lord Balfour, serving as Foreign Secretary, contemplated this problem from his imperial vantage in 1918 and observed: “Every time I come toa discussion - an intervals of say, five years — | find there is a new sphere we have got to guard,” he wrote. “Those gateways are getting further and further away from India, I don’t know how far west they are going to be brought by the General Staff.”245 This problem of where exactly to put the gates confronts us now as well. 245 “Those gateways”: Quoted in Robert Jervis, “Cooperation Under the Security Dilemma”, World Politics Vol 30, Issue 2 (Jan, 1978) p. 169 171 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018403