CH AP TER O N E Globalization and Spread of Cybered Conflict Copyright © 2011. University of Georgia Press. All rights reserved. C yberspace enables cooperation and conflict in nearly equal measure. In today’s open, near-free, digitally enabled globalization, new and old enemies from unempowered individuals to national-level leaders can use easy access to international systems to engage in conflict, or economics, or both. Barriers to entry have particularly fallen for bad actors seeking to exploit distant populations using cyberspace connections. Each set of actors today at their own chosen scale of organization can reach far, deep, and wide into other nations at little near-term physical cost or physical risk to themselves. At their whim, distant or hidden bad actors can also use cyberspace to add to others’ attacks for whatever reason or impulse. They may choose to opportunistically worsen natural disasters, expanding or redirecting disruptive cascading outcomes that disable key functions of whole societies, communities, or opposing military forces. In this world of global digital access, without great wealth, land, authority, or comrades in arms, opponents can easily attempt to harm in one big attack or many smaller attacks that can cumulate over time to even more destruction in tightly coupled modern systems. The intended victims may not even know their attackers, who can emerge from seemingly nowhere, whether inside or outside national borders. This new international reality creates the complexity of national security today and the need for a book reframing security strategy for modern democracies enmeshed in globally enabled cybered conflicts. The power of a modern state to reduce the harm of obscure unknown attackers lies in its ability to recognize emerging sources of surprise and to disrupt or accommodate them. Conflict between human societies has always been about successfully disrupting the opponent, whether that opponent was a raiding party, an army, a city, or a whole nation, to get some desired out- Demchak, Chris C.. Wars of Disruption and Resilience : Cybered Conflict, Power, and National Security, University of Georgia Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/apus/detail.action?docID=3039013. Created from apus on 2019-07-01 09:06:22. Copyright © 2011. University of Georgia Press. All rights reserved. [2] chapter one come. As structured social groups began to desire outcomes that could not be achieved without disrupting other similarly sized opponents, organized conflict emerged as a way to be successful in proportion to the need for disruption. War emerged as a violent conflict between armed organizations, the outcome of which was significant for the successful functioning of opposing societies (O’Connell 1989). Since people get up and get well after being hit and may not stop what they are doing if the object of contest is critical enough, the most readily chosen form of disruption became killing, especially of those who could get up to fight again. Today conflict is more likely to occur in its older, more basic sense: disrupting an opponent to achieve an outcome while ensuring that the opponent cannot succeed in disrupting one’s home social group. The difference between most of human history and today is that open global cyberspace has enabled would-be hidden, distant, or smallscale opponents to attempt societal disruption that historically only close neighbors or superpowers could consider. Harnessed to traditional notions of national security, modern democracies struggle to understand the complex critical systems they constructed for economic prosperity. These now enable nonstate as well as state actors to impose harm across the globe seemingly at will. As currently constructed, cyberspace offers malevolent actors anywhere with internet access three extraordinary advantages in conflict: such actors can easily choose the scale of their organization, the proximity of their targets, and the precision of their attack plans. In other words, initially unknown, distant, or hidden actors in, say, Ghana can use the global web to organize from five to five hundred compatriots, to attack from five to five thousand kilometers away, and to target from five to five million people in one or many democratic nations simultaneously.1 When globally enabled by open, near-free cyberspace, conflict becomes vastly more complex and surprising. Today what has been seen as the power of nations to defend themselves is in transition. The historically and conceptually easiest response to attackers was destruction, but as a strategy, such destruction is difficult, if not impossible, for organized modern democratic nations to exert effectively when those who might get up to fight again hide among 1. If one were to put these attributes in more concrete military operational terms, cyberspace offers an attacking force five characteristics: reach, free fire at will, mass targets, easy stealth, and near instantaneous high-capacity payload. Demchak, Chris C.. Wars of Disruption and Resilience : Cybered Conflict, Power, and National Security, University of Georgia Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/apus/detail.action?docID=3039013. Created from apus on 2019-07-01 09:06:22. Copyright © 2011. University of Georgia Press. All rights reserved. Globalization and Cybered Conflict [3] innocent civilians across the world under another nation’s rule of law. The modern international system is consensually characterized by an assumption that borders are immutable and that complete annihilation of an entire social group, let alone a country, is not acceptable. Today modern democracies act more like the democratic city-states: even if one wins a destructive war, the winning forces withdraw to let the defeated state recover as an independent country. Destruction does not produce many tangible gains. Furthermore, the first cyberspace-enabled attack may be so successful that even if one could physically destroy the perpetrators after the fact, the violent ripples across key systems in the defending social systems could take years to mitigate, recover, and innovate beyond. Destruction in response may be attempted, but the returns would not in any way compensate for the initial disruptive losses. Under such circumstances, the ability of the defending social group to march armies to the border to stop a neighbor or face down a superpower would be a simply inadequate and tardy strategic response. Today a nation’s “power” rests on its capacities to meet the wide range of cybered conflicts, both disrupting in advance and being resilient to systemic surprise imposed by hidden, distant, and difficult to identify enemies, whether they are state or nonstate actors. This strategic combination of disruption and resilience capacities constitutes the cyber power of a modern democratic state. At its most elemental construction, the modern digitized nation-state must be able to disrupt attackers in advance or during the attack in progress before key systems in the home society are disabled in any significant way. Both capacities—reaching out to disrupt and reaching in to ensure resilience—are critical to national power in a world of cybered conflict. Modern nations can no longer sit behind their borders, treaties, alliances, or militaries. The cybered age taking shape in front of us requires a new framework for national security, one of security resilience.2 Based on a syncretic approach to international theories and to theories of complexity and surprise, such a strategy aims to balance appropriately the national institutional capacities for 2. As of this writing, I can find no other scholarly use of the term security resilience. I note, however, that a document published in advance of the spring election in the United Kingdom comes very close. See “A Resilient Nation: National Security Green Paper,” 2009, http://www.conservatives.com/~/media/Files/Green%20Papers/National_Security_Green_ Paper.ashx?dl=true. Demchak, Chris C.. Wars of Disruption and Resilience : Cybered Conflict, Power, and National Security, University of Georgia Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/apus/detail.action?docID=3039013. Created from apus on 2019-07-01 09:06:22. Copyright © 2011. University of Georgia Press. All rights reserved. [4] chapter one disruption of would-be attackers while simultaneously ensuring societal resilience to potentially cascading and disabling surprises in critical national systems. For the modern digitized democracies viewed as today’s large city-states, the global, nearly free, deeply intruding access of cyberspace extends the number, scale, reach, and abilities of potential enemies far beyond history’s usual set of suspects comprising neighbors, roving bandits, and the occasional expanding empire. The nature of “war” moves from societally threatening one-off clashes of violence between close neighbors to a global version of long-term, episodically and catastrophically dangerous, chronic insecurities that involve the whole society. In cybered conflict across a digitally open international system, traditional strategic buffers of distance or declared borders do not stop societally critical attacks. The modern equivalents of ancient city-states face the dilemmas of their predecessors: how to disrupt an attacker that one usually cannot destroy as well as ensure the attack itself does not disrupt the city’s systems critically. Now, as then, society’s security depends on how well the community institutionalizes its security strategy with knowledge, consensus, skills, and design. In the post–Cold War era, national security depends on the dynamic and responsive weighting of disruption and resilience integrated into a strategy for the inevitably long term in a chronic war against each emerging surprise attacker or attack from anywhere in the cybered world. At the end of the day, the central normative concern is with averting violent harm as a consequence of conflict that is critically enabled by cybered tools. Because cyberspace is global, nearly free, and easy to use, the Cold War notions of reaching out to destroy an attacker are too narrow, and resilience needs to be an essential part of disruption. The tools of harm will come from surprising sources, including those previously considered only domestic concerns such as cyber stealing from wealthier westerners. As an occupation, cyber stealing seems not much of a national-level threat, but the global community engaged in this kind of anonymous activity also develops the tools for other bad actors much more focused on violent harm. While democratic nations may seek only to disrupt attackers or their attacks, violent harm is the primus inter pares goal of those hostile to westernized nations. With sufficiently stoked grievances among the surging youth populations of dysfunctional regions, attacks to achieve this violence will inevitably impose surprise in cybered ways for the next generation at least. Demchak, Chris C.. Wars of Disruption and Resilience : Cybered Conflict, Power, and National Security, University of Georgia Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/apus/detail.action?docID=3039013. Created from apus on 2019-07-01 09:06:22. Globalization and Cybered Conflict [5] Copyright © 2011. University of Georgia Press. All rights reserved. E M ERG I N G U N CIVIL C YBERED I N TER N ATI O N A L SYS TE M Before the complexities of globalization began to change the international environment, the strategic borders of rivers, mountains, seas, walls, or armed guards clarified friend from foe. With the emergence of the modern state, nationally threatening enemies did not emanate from both outside and inside the society simultaneously (Tilly 1992). National security missions could be clearly allocated to either domestic or international arenas, specialized and constrained accordingly. In the bipolar Cold War era, that clarity solidified and routinized with only two significant superpower players in global conflicts. Nations singly or allied in blocs were focused on the threats from one or the other major player. Security communities across the westernized world focused on narrow questions such as launch times and counterattack nuclear payload, geographic distances to move through and occupy in rebuffing a military challenge, and peculiarities of a relatively small number of personalities in security-related international or domestic politics (Sagan and Waltz 1995; E. A. Cohen 2004). In many respects due to the clarity of the enemies, the Cold War era’s major security dilemmas were defined more like the set-piece division of threats of western Europe in the 1700s. Institutions grew up focused on either national security threats or domestic concerns regarding social well-being, order, organized criminality, or societal service functions (Strachan 1983). Technologies and the security of the social order of societies are deeply intertwined and interactive. During the 1800s, across Europe’s borders, that era’s modernization waves roiled societies burdened with the excess farm population. By the late 1840s, Europe saw violent uprisings in most of its capitals (Sperber 2005). Similarly, the Cold War’s technological advances and prosperity inconspicuously developed the elements of today’s declining ability to secure borders. Its legacies in globally linked dependencies and small lethal packages of lethal weapons continue to arm enemies or friends, to open or close vulnerabilities, and to stimulate or dampen concerns about security (O’Connell 1989). Individuals, groups, or communities recognizing threats inevitably find ways to use new technologies in their security strategy, even if the solution is a new type of boat by which to run away or a long hunting bow redirected to attack other humans. The cybered world has challenged the broad but neat internal and external distinctions of security cemented in the bipolar era. Modern actors have Demchak, Chris C.. Wars of Disruption and Resilience : Cybered Conflict, Power, and National Security, University of Georgia Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/apus/detail.action?docID=3039013. Created from apus on 2019-07-01 09:06:22. Copyright © 2011. University of Georgia Press. All rights reserved. [6] chapter one discovered how to integrate the exceptionally fast and readily available global communications networks in their plans for conflict. Widely connected, unconstrained, and easily accessed global systems routinely undermine three historically critical dampeners on hostilities—long geographical distances, difficulties in organizing and controlling large enough groups of people, and poor knowledge of the target—in order to be sure to attack effectively. Attacks in history, by contrast, were more likely to be local or littoral, where at least knowledge of the target was easier to obtain. Attack organizations were likely to be small and local or very large and controlled by a state-level equivalent leader or oligarchy. Operations were either raids or campaigns big enough to survive the multitude of surprises from what was unknown, unorganized, or too far to reach (O’Connell 1989). These obstacles historically constrained conflict to being local or between state-level entities. When globalized communications relax the three dampeners on scale, proximity, and precision, offense at a distance is made easier for those with more-limited resources. A digitized community like a modern nation-state is especially more vulnerable to new attackers from distant poorer and semigoverned rogue states, failing cities, or turbulent hinterlands. The advanced civil societies are deeply embedded in global nets. In contrast, the homelands of the potential new attackers may be internally violent, corrupt, or exploitative, but they are also markedly less digitized. The societies of the dysfunctional regions of the world are less easy or productive cyber targets. The result is a marked divide in security concerns now emerging between two broad communities of the globally cybered world that do not share the same expectations in acceptable individual and collective behaviors, civil governance, normal societal security, and mechanisms of resource allocations. Including not only the westernized nations but also rapidly developing democracies such as India, the first group acts collectively and individually more like history’s city-states. While competing strongly economically, they do not engage in violent existential conflict with each other.3 They share a roughly convergent collective notion of security, which includes stability, rule of law, honesty, transparency, and importantly, a strong dislike for violent behavior, whether by individuals or states. In contrast, the other group of semigovernable 3. It is possible that the U.S.-China relationship could emerge more violently as the conflict between two large city-states contesting regional dominance. The likelihood is low, but higher than any chance of such conflict between other westernized nations. Demchak, Chris C.. Wars of Disruption and Resilience : Cybered Conflict, Power, and National Security, University of Georgia Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/apus/detail.action?docID=3039013. Created from apus on 2019-07-01 09:06:22. Copyright © 2011. University of Georgia Press. All rights reserved. Globalization and Cybered Conflict [7] regions, societies, or darker areas of cyberspace are frequently demographically unstable, politically barely coherent, and poorly productive economically. Collectively termed the “badlands” merely as a shorthand in this book, these areas tend to be internally corrupt, secretive, brutal, and accepting of higher levels of violent behavior as normal though regrettable. This group acts often as a spoiler both in its own internal operations and in the wider international system, becoming a source of global turbulence and of a large volume of mobile bad actors sharing few of the social constraints of the more-digitized nations. Between the two groups, huge digitally enabled flows of information, people, goods, and resources transfer enormous economic benefits but also misperceptions, weapons, targeting data, and reasons for hostility and resentment. There are large demographic and wealth imbalances between the two groups, and not yet fully understood are possibilities for waves of social turbulence likely to come in the not far future. The 2011 upheavals in Egypt and Tunisia are likely to be foretastes of future instabilities from these more-dysfunctional areas. Too many young males in unstable, semigoverned developing societies perceive little hope for a better life. Global transport systems and cyberspace give these likely aggrieved young populations unprecedented access physically or digitally to the more organized, open, wealthy, civil centers of the world. For example, key experts on global radical Islam have argued its newest expression, the leaderless cell jihad often led by career jihadists in and out of prison and orchestrated by cybered methods, will be around at a minimum for the next twenty years (Pluchinsky 2008). The widespread availability of cyberspace makes it all too possible in densely populated poorer areas to “farm” deprivation or cultural aversion grievances, whether led by a local group, a national leader, or the cadre of an international cult or movement. Because of the low costs of reaching large numbers of people online, appeals that would have died out in prior generations today survive and sometimes even revive. Through the graphics and availability of the global communications networks, an organizer can deliberately stoke hate or misperceptions and educate across a wider audience about how to perpetrate attacks in, through, or merely enabled by cyberspace. Small, otherwise forgettable data can be retained for access and endless reuse and distortion globally. For example, the worldwide neo-Nazi movement was small and isolated when communication could only travel to would-be recruits through mailed pamphlets or wandering promoters. The spread of global networks even in the 1990s allowed promoters located in places like Canada to reach easily and of- Demchak, Chris C.. Wars of Disruption and Resilience : Cybered Conflict, Power, and National Security, University of Georgia Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/apus/detail.action?docID=3039013. Created from apus on 2019-07-01 09:06:22. Copyright © 2011. University of Georgia Press. All rights reserved. [8] chapter one ten into the rooms of unhappy, lower-class teenagers in former East Germany or other Eastern European states, producing a boom in supporters by the end of the 1990s (Rochlin 1997). In the unfettered netted world, global communities of hate acting malevolently are as likely as those of free will and tolerance expanding civility (Rochlin 1997). In 2010 a talk by an American agricultural official was recorded, and several sentences selectively edited were widely replayed and discussed to show that the speaker, an African American, was against Caucasian people. In fact, she had helped the Caucasian farmer she was discussing, but that portion was not included in the widespread distribution of the misleading quotes. The result for the official was not only losing her job, at least temporarily, but also being the target of death threats left on her home phone and sent by email. The difference from even twenty years prior is that all this happened within thirty-six hours of the initial malicious online blog posting (cnn staff 2010). The evolving surprises from digitally enabled global exchanges challenge the deeply buried assumptions of security in the modern civil societies. Until recently, many nations did not have laws against malicious hackers as the attacks did not seem at first to obviously clash with the social presumptions, legal entitlements, economic distributions, and strategic outlook of the digitized nations. Cyber criminals, however, now routinely develop tools that delve deeply and covertly into public, commercial, and private networks. Not only are these tools for sale to anyone, including other bad actors, but also in many nations buying and using the tools that operated thousands of infected computer networks still remains legal. For example, when the operators of the largest networks of infected computers worldwide were finally caught in Spain, prosecution by law was not possible. That form of attack was not illegal in Spain (Krebs 2010). With the perfect storm of coalescing events and credulous actors, today inchoate panicky feelings fed by imagery and catalyzing symbolic language on trusted websites or phone text messages can in any society rapidly migrate to physical threats and ultimately to organized attacks (Calhoun 1989). In the tumult, the topology and conflict pathways of the international system are changing as well. Domesticating International System Led by Modern “City-States” Today the international system is rapidly “domesticating” in major regions. Among the modern, digitized, democratic nations, the world system is increas- Demchak, Chris C.. Wars of Disruption and Resilience : Cybered Conflict, Power, and National Security, University of Georgia Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/apus/detail.action?docID=3039013. Created from apus on 2019-07-01 09:06:22. Copyright © 2011. University of Georgia Press. All rights reserved. Globalization and Cybered Conflict [9] ingly in large part cooperatively transnational in its internal coupling, dependencies, and conflicts. Policies and players accommodate each other across borders of modern democratic nations and share increasingly similar expectations about life, education, income stability, health, government services, and safety. As networked offices and homes pull individuals and groups in the westernized world recognizably closer to each other, the large populations exist in distinct legal systems, but economic, military, and cognitive distances between them are shortening dramatically. The otherwise sovereign modern westernized and democratic nations in particular are exceptionally unlikely to engage in threatening postures and preparations to fight each other. Despite the history of the twentieth century, one cannot today imagine a Germany attacking any westernized nation for any reason. Equally hard is to conceive of the circumstance under which any part of the former Western Europe erupts in violent conflict with any part of North America. For these nations, violence across a national border is more likely to come from outside their communities, from the interpenetrating dysfunctional areas. While the emergent dysfunctional areas of the world express a “new medievalism” suggested by several international relations scholars, among the modernized, more-digitized nations of the world, the old world of state-against-state war as the only dominant and critical form of conflict no longer exists (Booth 1991).4 The topology of the international system is evolving in response to these ideologically and economically similar nations acting like city-states within a larger confederation. They create international regimes, norms, and standards and largely observe their own collectively determined rules. Their economic, political, and cognitive world increasingly involves densely integrated, consensually controlled, and cooperative regional structures and similarly managed large transnational institutions. In particular, these modern city-states manifest a near universal dislike for conquest or externally imposed violence threatening a nation’s internationally recognized borders. In the post–World War II decades, states recognized by the United Nations, no matter how dysfunctional, may face subversion, long-range missiles, and economic tragedies, but generally not conquerors. This injunction against cross-border land grabs has been strongly defended 4. “The Middle Ages were characterized by a highly fragmented and decentralized network of sociopolitical relationships, held together by the competing universalistic claims of the Empire and the Church” (Friedrichs 2001, 475). Demchak, Chris C.. Wars of Disruption and Resilience : Cybered Conflict, Power, and National Security, University of Georgia Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/apus/detail.action?docID=3039013. Created from apus on 2019-07-01 09:06:22. Copyright © 2011. University of Georgia Press. All rights reserved. [10] chapter one by developed city-states and underdeveloped nations alike. In a truly anarchic world of states, the nations with the largest nuclear missile inventories would be considered potential territorial security threats. Yet neither France nor the United Kingdom is so considered by the United States. Even fig-leaf, internally imposed coups in Eastern Europe orchestrated at the onset of the Cold War by the former Soviet Union preserved the illusion of national independent sovereignty. Rigged elections enabling Soviet-controlled local communists to take over a satellite nation were the only way the former Soviet Union could expand its imperial reach and yet claim modern legitimacy as a state in the international community. Even when city-states seem to have empires, they differ markedly in control, scale, and purpose from the empires based on territorial gain. As typified by the Italian Renaissance commercial city-states, territorial domination by a city was for the purpose of obtaining raw materials, usually from the surrounding agricultural region or fishing areas (Holmes 1988). Generally such cities attempted to exert physical control only over the surrounding region to ensure a supply of raw materials and often foodstuffs. Even a city-state-based “empire” was rarely considered a major violent threat. The ancient Athenian “empire” was more of a loose network of scattered cities. Many of these cities were established purely for the purposes of sustaining the flow of raw goods into Athens and to provide an outlet for poorer citizens to leave the overcrowded capital city (Freeman 2000). Even in the ancient world, a war that led accidentally to conquest would also see the subsequent devolution of the new property to proxy owners, or sometimes later the original owners, as the Spartans did for Athens in 404 bce (Martin 1996, 160). City-states historically do not challenge territorial borders, and the international community of modern states today often does not act even when faced with horrifically and brutally failing states, piously honoring de jure borders that are de facto not functioning. One could reasonably argue that this presumed “fixity” of borders acts to the detriment of the communities involved, and yet the norm of inviolability is widely observed (Krasner 1999). City-states tend to have limited horizons, with stability in their environment as a very high priority. Today it is reasonable to argue that Rwanda controls much of eastern Congo. Yet there is exceptionally limited academic and nearly no international political support for redrawing the outdated and useless borders drawn during Africa’s colonial period (Krasner 2004). Furthermore, while states may maintain clear borders on maps, and occa- Demchak, Chris C.. Wars of Disruption and Resilience : Cybered Conflict, Power, and National Security, University of Georgia Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/apus/detail.action?docID=3039013. Created from apus on 2019-07-01 09:06:22. Copyright © 2011. University of Georgia Press. All rights reserved. Globalization and Cybered Conflict [11] sionally close them completely, city-states strongly support sieved boundaries intentionally kept open to ensure the flow of commerce. If walls are too strong, they inhibit economically sustaining trade. Today’s westernized states are not self-sufficient for the level of economic prosperity they enjoy, and their borders are increasingly porous, electronically and physically. Globalization’s historically unprecedented international flows of critical goods, capital, information, and people have sweetened the gains to be made by widespread porosity in state borders, along with obscuring the rise in threats from bad actors entering with the normal flows. Just how intertwined and interdependent major states have become was recently reflected in the lead paint and tainted toothpaste scandals associated with imports from China. Although it seemed objectively clear that Chinese imports were not being scrutinized either on their way out of China or on their way into the United States, no effort was made on the part of the harmed state, the United States, to punish China. Rather, Chinese leverage over major U.S. corporations forced corporate leaders to ascribe poor Chinese workmanship to themselves in order to maintain the lucrative trading arrangements. An exceptional culturally distinct public apology on the part of the American corporate leaders was demanded and given for the shame China felt at the revelations of these flawed goods (Story 2007). Most Western observers found the practice simply curious and even farcical. That American corporate leaders would, in effect, debase themselves and lie publicly for a contract is an indication of the new relationships among globally interdependent trading entities. States in anarchic and largely autarkic systems do not have to put up with such insults, but city-states are largely too dependent on the surrounding system and trade flows to engage in insults or hostilities in response.5 In an emerging world of city-states and interpenetrating dysfunctional areas, the civil commerce-oriented societies fall into the categories of friendly, neutral, or merely unreliable trading partners, rather than enemies. Even when a state qua city-state actually has the capability of harming another state’s homeland, seldom will the situation be addressed as realists would predict—as a fight to obliterate a potential enemy with threatening capacities. Historically 5. It is worth noting that after being traumatized by the excesses of the Vietnam War abroad and at home, the philosopher Bertrand Russell said that his view of the coming centuries was of squabbling city-states with implications for governance, war, and peace (Russell and Russell 1996). Demchak, Chris C.. Wars of Disruption and Resilience : Cybered Conflict, Power, and National Security, University of Georgia Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/apus/detail.action?docID=3039013. Created from apus on 2019-07-01 09:06:22. Copyright © 2011. University of Georgia Press. All rights reserved. [12] chapter one city-state conflicts reflected this disinterest in decisively physical competition. In the two periods best known for their independent city-states with rudimentary democratic participation, ancient Greece and fifteenth-century Italy, cities did “war” with each other in complex and shifting alliances (Lebow and Kelly 2001). But in both eras, without the intervention of external powers (Persia in Greece and the pope in Italy), the city-states over time and through productive trade became simply too evenly matched in wealth, luck, or cultural aversion to carry through a conquest (Manicas 1982; Holmes 1988). Wars among the city-states, such as they were, dragged on at a low level, creating not just war weariness in the respective citizens but also disinterest and acceptance of low-level warfare as a chronic fact of life (Connor 1988). Sparta’s attempt to dominate Greece, especially Athens, went on for forty years in an almost random pattern of sudden Spartan probing attacks on one city or another. Usually the attack was heralded by spies. Next, neighboring cities banded together with Athens to repulse the Spartan marauders, and then the alliance would dissolve (Robinson 2001). In the later era in Italy, many of the wars between the city-states were really long-term feuds between merchant houses. The “war” would fizzle out once one of the central figures died or a cross-merchant house marriage with attendant inheritances would bring the warring sides together (Holmes 1988). Today, similar feuds result in massive hostile takeovers and strategic divorces across continents, but not war. The competition for resources and access among these westernized nations qua massive city-states is ruthless, opportunistic, and even sometimes insulting, but not likely to be violent. Indeed, under the right circumstances, quite sensitive internal data such as financial records will be shared among neighboring states as if all the nations involved belonged to the same overarching confederation (EurActive Network 2010). This “domestication” of the international political system and the subsequent change in violent threat patterns contributes to confusion in lessons drawn from the literature on the phenomenon of democratic peace (Starr 1992). Democracy is much more a product, than a producer, of civility. An evolution into large entities with city-state features means the pursuit of civil competitive behaviors due more to recognition of the loss of autarky than the rudimentary practices of a democracy (Ember, Ember, and Russett 1992; Russett and Antholis 1992). Rational state-level decision makers cannot afford to be at odds with sister city-states providing essential goods and services. Furthermore the data is murky on which state is or is not really a democracy. Of- Demchak, Chris C.. Wars of Disruption and Resilience : Cybered Conflict, Power, and National Security, University of Georgia Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/apus/detail.action?docID=3039013. Created from apus on 2019-07-01 09:06:22. Copyright © 2011. University of Georgia Press. All rights reserved. Globalization and Cybered Conflict [13] ten, especially recently, the label is applied simply when suffrage is universal, and ostensibly free elections are routinely held. Many new, and some older, democracies are hardly sterling representatives of the other civility-inducing aspects often found in thriving trading cities—a rule of law (even if privately enforced) and reliable stability in monetarized means of exchange.6 Rather, the slow transformation of the international community into city-like entities does not require democracy pur to make interstate relations more civil. For example, Singapore’s adept rise in economic status and stability was certainly not due to democratic principles; however, the societal stability and civility have at the end produced democracy (Chua 1997). In the anarchic system, autarkic states may not have to explicitly recognize their sustaining dependencies, but to survive, city-states must. Their national security policies and institutions ignore this recognition only at their peril (Ember, Ember, and Russett 1992; Held 1992).7 Not recognizing the rise of the city-state community and, importantly, its critical underlying financial linkages has already proven costly in recent years. To the stated astonishment of financial experts across the westernized modern world, the 2008 U.S. domestic mortgage industry meltdown rippled destructively through otherwise unnoticed tightly coupled connections critically enabling the wealth of the international financial system. In a domesticating international system, citystate political leaders should never have been surprised to find their individual societal control of policy outcomes migrate out of previously recognized and expected future paths. 6. Elections do not make a democracy. Educated citizens, tolerance for differences in opinion, lifestyle, and economic advantage, and reasonable expectations of mutuality in respect, civil rights, and access to resources embedded in functioning social systems make a democracy. Unfortunately modern American politicians and many good-hearted internationalists do not understand that distinction between the resulting democracy and this list of prerequisites. The framers of the American Constitution did. See the Federalist Papers by Madison for a good example of this clear insight. These documents are widely available online, e.g., http://www.foundingfathers.info/federalistpapers. Many in westernized democracies take for granted that evidence of a functioning democracy is simply having some electoral choice, but many dictators make sure they are elected, at least once. Hitler and Mussolini were both dictators, and both were elected originally in putatively democratic elections. 7. It is worth mentioning that massive, failed cities such as Lagos, Nigeria, can by their scale and dysfunction put their nation in the group of the world’s dysfunctional states rather than in the community of city-states (Gandy 2006). Demchak, Chris C.. Wars of Disruption and Resilience : Cybered Conflict, Power, and National Security, University of Georgia Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/apus/detail.action?docID=3039013. Created from apus on 2019-07-01 09:06:22. [14] chapter one Copyright © 2011. University of Georgia Press. All rights reserved. Deeper Security Surprises Surprise is a hallmark of the emerging globally connected world, especially in its security challenges to modern digitized democracies. With a globally networked world, physical proximity no longer constrains the dysfunctional behaviors of a geographically distant “badlands” as it once did, making modern notions of the highly restricted, externally focused roles of militaries or security forces difficult to apply. Enemies of concern for national security are rapidly changing their frequency, reach, and even form of threat. With exceptionally fewer state-level possible enemies, the bulk of rising national security threats are often diffuse, opportunistic, chronic, semicovert (“gray”), and globally surprising organizations hiding in nations whose leaders may or may not have the ability to control undesirable activities. Unlike the traditional threats of peer states for which most national security forces today have been designed and socialized, the bad actors emerging in droves in dysfunctional areas do not have—nor need—established weaponsystem inventories and ambitions to create a nation with a border. With a cybered world, transnational organizations are emerging as the normal form of a nonstate actor that could pose harm to distant enemies. These organizations do not stay solely in one nation; they also have less need to concentrate resources in any given place. They are in an open cybered world “ungrounded” and much less trackable by anyone’s security services. These organizational threats do not need to sustain ties to a home society for resource and psychological support as Italian Mafia historically needed. Rather, they need to learn how or to hire those who know how to use a mass array of high-volume, usually privately owned, long-distance undersea cables linking continents in order to challenge traditional geographical notions of national power and interests (Wriston 1992). Unlike most social and technical systems known to human history, the global cyberspace cannot be easily observed from the outside, and therefore it cannot be easily monitored for threats as it expands. Unless one “enters” cyberspace, one cannot “see” into it physically. Connecting to the global networks means both opening a door out into the rest of the connected world and a window into one’s own part of it. For security services, the world’s interconnected networks present a two-edged sword that is particularly challenging. Like trading city-states, one cannot close the borders and still receive any of its benefits. Hence, cyberspace is both freeing and threatening for the structures of society. Demchak, Chris C.. Wars of Disruption and Resilience : Cybered Conflict, Power, and National Security, University of Georgia Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/apus/detail.action?docID=3039013. Created from apus on 2019-07-01 09:06:22. Copyright © 2011. University of Georgia Press. All rights reserved. Globalization and Cybered Conflict [15] This dual-use nature of the increasingly ubiquitous digital connectivity is what makes this topic so difficult to sort out. To make a violent attack beyond mere cyber vandalism against websites, attackers can use online access to coordinate a more traditional attack of, say, suicide bombers on airlines. They can also operate through the myriad of international networks to transmit an attack on something at a node, say denying the services of a critical system, ideally simultaneously in multiple locations such as water control systems. Or they could attack the World Wide Web directly, disconnecting key areas of the digital infrastructure of society itself. Of the three options, the second is likely to be the most successful and violent. The first involves the movement of humans or goods that use cyberspace as a coordinating mechanism. But it is hampered by logistics. Humans are more inconvenient, traceable, and slower to move around than internet commands. Traditional and newly developed defensive mechanisms are more attuned to stopping human-borne threats. The third option—destroying the international networks in key places—is hampered deliberately by the design of the multiple nodes and packets of cyberspace’s underlying networks. The system was set up in the 1960s. Even the loss of a major internet cable, as happened to Iran in 2008, only slows internet communication to a crawl, rather than shutting it off completely (Hafner 1999; Forte and Power 2008). To pursue the second option, using cyberspace itself as a weapon for major violent effects, generally involves making “internetted” systems critical to the society act badly or stop functioning completely. In this case, the attacker or group steals access to and then takes control of critical applications in the targeted facility or on the central command server of a wider network. An example would be bypassing the physically difficult direct hijacking of airliners and going for covertly hacking into air traffic controls. One might deceive the controllers’ computers into reporting false airliner locations and then insert fixes that cause mass collisions simultaneously across an array of airports.8 While the air traffic control scenario is already being made extraordinarily difficult today in the Western world, the same cannot be said for many other critical digitally connected societal services around the world. The Stuxnet worm that successfully attacked the nuclear reactors of Iran in 2010 would be an example of this second kind of attack. The malicious software successfully 8. For the nervous reader, I use this example because of how hard this would be to do (Lemos 2002). Demchak, Chris C.. Wars of Disruption and Resilience : Cybered Conflict, Power, and National Security, University of Georgia Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/apus/detail.action?docID=3039013. Created from apus on 2019-07-01 09:06:22. Copyright © 2011. University of Georgia Press. All rights reserved. [16] chapter one disabled huge centrifuges and stalled the significant nuclear projects of a nation (Sanger 2010). Attackers can always rely on human inattentiveness as well as faulty, buggy, or older technology. They spend days and months searching for obscure entrance tunnels often overlooked by users and designers amid the vast array of electronically interconnected computers and applications. When attackers finally find the hole and enter the system, the options for violence expand greatly. A malicious actor can order the local server, computer, or even single application to vandalize itself or others connected to it. This bad actor can also order the violated local computer to spy on the host human, group, or other computers and gather information useful later for violent attacks. Or the local computer can be ordered to hide a program and wait for a signal to do something to destroy itself or others connected to it (O’Brien 2003). The national security threat for society is that these exploited backdoors lead to one’s home computer and also to the computers managing massive regional or national electrical systems running elevators, street lights, water plants, and air traffic systems, sometimes at the same time (Knapp and Boulton 2007). No service or firm or home that is more efficiently and effectively run with networked systems is immune. The infrastructure pathways include the electronic brains of packed subway systems and hurtling commuter trains, not to mention the isolation of hazardous material in oil-to-gasoline production plants and the control of toxic chlorine in municipal water filtration and cleaning systems. The sudden dysfunction of any of these major underlying systems in a wide enough simultaneous attack and the difficulty of immediately replacing them would be akin to the destruction of infrastructure witnessed in the devastation of New Orleans in 2006 after a hurricane or northern Japan in 2011 after the tsunami. The difference is that an attack conducted via cyberspace could involve ten major cities at once and the attackers could adapt and return again and again. If enough cities are hit at once, the limited emergency resources designed for single major failures are likely to be spread too thin or simply be inadequate. For example, a massive unexpected and unusual windstorm in Western Europe during the winter of 2007–8 affected electricity users from Germany to the Ukraine. The effects included the nearly complete stoppage of both trains in Germany and trans-Europe oil-pumping stations (Associated Press 2007). An attack on the central hubs of Europe’s disparate electricity transmission network could achieve the same effect, and even worse than very obvious Demchak, Chris C.. Wars of Disruption and Resilience : Cybered Conflict, Power, and National Security, University of Georgia Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/apus/detail.action?docID=3039013. Created from apus on 2019-07-01 09:06:22. Copyright © 2011. University of Georgia Press. All rights reserved. Globalization and Cybered Conflict [17] windstorms, malicious code could be sent from thousands of computers held by unwitting owners, making it hard to stop the attack in its tracks. The rub is that city-states need openness for commerce and wealth, and this need is readily exploited by semicovert or “gray” organizations operating through, around, and in spite of recognized governments.9 From behind staunchly internationally maintained state borders, these actors can impose violence at great distance and unpredictably because of the easy access to democratic city-state systems afforded to all other states as a matter of international state-state reciprocity. As the international mafia organizations have demonstrated for decades, it is useful for badland threats to maintain dual identities. Not only are these gray organizations emerging on a scale historically never possible, but they pose a particularly pernicious form of threat equally unprecedented for the national security of these city-states. Not only can anyone open up a website today for the entire world to see, but that site can be laden with hidden tools, messages, instructions, and bad intentions for anyone who visits the site and whose computer may then become a tool for an attack. The modern city-state attackers, whether state or nonstate or a combination, easily hide in the volume and complexity of the open access routes offered to all overtly legal transnational organizations and exchanges. Furthermore, the city-state defenders must deal with the rise of a different kind of threat beyond that posed by transborder subnational groups: the “false front state.” Much of the theory of international conflict assumes the survival of the state is recognized as necessary by its political leaders whose gains cannot be realized elsewhere. While early postcolonial authoritarians could, and did, create Swiss bank accounts for themselves, they generally tried to keep 9. The use of the term gray to mean “semi-covert” has both intelligence and information sciences provenances. The common understanding is of a class of phenomena neither white (friendly) or black (enemy) in the intelligence field, or neither explicit (published, tagged, and searchable) or implicit/tacit (unpublished, uncatalogued, and untraceable with normal means) in the information sciences field (Correia and de Castro Neto 2002; Jeffery 2000). Gray is a more useful term than the recent use of dark, as in the “dark web” (Chen, Wang, and Zeng 2004) or “dark networks” (Milward and Raab 2002), because of the colloquial connotation with gray as “something in-between.” One might even think of gray organizations as “dual use” in much the same way as technologies are suspected of being usable for both good and ill purposes. In a globalizing world with much greater reach from ill uses, dual-use technologies have caused no end of trouble and confusion in arms negotiations (Stowsky 2004). Demchak, Chris C.. Wars of Disruption and Resilience : Cybered Conflict, Power, and National Security, University of Georgia Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/apus/detail.action?docID=3039013. Created from apus on 2019-07-01 09:06:22. Copyright © 2011. University of Georgia Press. All rights reserved. [18] chapter one some measure of state integrity and health in order to keep reaping wealth and personal reputation. Today, leaders of a low-capacity near failing “state” with digital links to the resources of the westernized city-states can more easily act against their citizens’ and their neighbors’ security in ways difficult to challenge from a state accepted into the international system as a normal state. In the freewheeling finances of a cybered world, corruption in semigoverned states rises in importance internationally. In a financially and operationally linked cybered world, the corrupt actors no longer merely enrich themselves in the home nation, but they can operate through the otherwise legal mechanisms of state functions to globally hide their bad behaviors in the legal financial systems of other nations. It has been a long while since any serious scholar believed corruption in developing nations in a cybered world naturally greased the nascent mechanisms of fledgling market economies.10 However, today corruption can have national security implications far from the failing state. Criminals, states acting by proxy, and transnational bad actors of all flavors can bribe, fool, and coerce national-level officials in a failing state into creating the necessary legal covers for the bad actors to gain entry into critical systems, financial or otherwise, of the westernized nations. City-states’ security can be undermined by these corrupted states of convenience whose rights to free passage across the cybered world are unquestioned internationally. These false front states now more easily act in ways inimical to the security of the state and their citizens, as well as to the stability across the wider international community of states. They can vote in the un, act militarily, change markets, and deceive on a global scale with rippling consequences elsewhere (Thachuk 2005). The tiny Pacific island of Tuvalu, for example, has been a major contributor to spam and cybercrime internationally due to its easily acquired and ungoverned sale of the .tv domain name (Kenny 2007). While essential for city-state prosperity, the globe’s digital capital-flow virtual highways easily enable false front states. Developing nations especially with large, ungovernable, territorial swathes easily contribute to the ranks of the world’s badlands. For example, a drug lord in ungoverned Thai jungles can more easily establish and monitor a Swiss bank account, laundering funds as well as purchasing digitally the weapons he needs to control and murder. To 10. Nye (1967) argues that corruption as private vice can be positive under some conditions and has probably helped both the U.S. and Russian economies in the past. Demchak, Chris C.. Wars of Disruption and Resilience : Cybered Conflict, Power, and National Security, University of Georgia Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/apus/detail.action?docID=3039013. Created from apus on 2019-07-01 09:06:22. Copyright © 2011. University of Georgia Press. All rights reserved. Globalization and Cybered Conflict [19] the varying likelihoods, these semigoverned nation-states are more likely to host the bad actors seeking to impose a new deleterious surprise on a democracy. Such gray organizations are all the more perplexing to decipher because the visible perpetrators—the state-level leaders—appear to be committing an entirely modern form of long-term economic starvation. The capital flows are so massive and rapid that state coffers can be irreparably emptied to obscured foreign banks without much record in minutes, while the whole transaction is protected by the originating or receiving state’s laws on privacy. National economic suicide would have been irrational in previous eras where the corrupt leaders normally had to keep their corruption winnings in the home society to buy off compatriots and keep the flow coming. Certainly the role of the emerging cybered world in encouraging such distortions is difficult for Western states to reconcile and question. There is limited international interest in directly challenging the presumption of statehood expressed in the un charter, irrespective of the cost to the lives and prosperity of the citizens in one of these corrupted states. In the cybered international environment of democratic modern city-states and the highly varied turbulent regions, security challenges from a cybered world inevitably involve large amounts of surprise, whether from states, nonstate actors, or some new form of attack. Historically successful city-states had an instinctively developed two-part strategy. First, if they recognized a threat, they tried to disrupt the attackers in the surrounding land or sea narrows before the offensive forces could get to the city gates. But they also knew by experience that their city needed to be able to withstand a siege if the external disruption plan did not succeed. Not only was uncertainty recognized; for those market city-states that survived, surprise clearly needed to be accommodated in advance. Furthermore, the strategy had to recognize the cognitive disabling effects of surprise as well as the concrete disruption possibilities. Pericles, for example, recognized that puzzlement and shock often allow a cascade of negative effects to avalanche into a catastrophe (La Porte 1996). Having patterns that repeat reliably in a complex system matters to human daily functioning because humans have a cognitive need for stability in expectations. They will accept extraordinarily negative circumstances only if the events are predictable in form or frequency. Pericles practiced the evacuation to the city walls by farmers when his spies indicated a coming Spartan attack, as well as storing supplies for a number of months in order to make it automatic (E. E. Cohen Demchak, Chris C.. Wars of Disruption and Resilience : Cybered Conflict, Power, and National Security, University of Georgia Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/apus/detail.action?docID=3039013. Created from apus on 2019-07-01 09:06:22. Copyright © 2011. University of Georgia Press. All rights reserved. [20] chapter one 1992). The citizens practicing a solution to surprise is a strategic asset that reduces the sense of extreme mystification at an event that can be paralyzing and often delays appropriate action (Casti 1994). In the security challenges posed by a world of city-states vulnerable to cyber-enabled attacks from dysfunctional regions, the more tightly coupled the critical structures are within the targeted society, the more likely are accurate mitigating responses by that society to be delayed. For example, a traditionally purely domestic structure—the marginal home-loan market—imploded in the United States in mid-2008. International onlookers were markedly transfixed in surprise. The spreading effects of a lack of confidence in banks ground the world’s credit markets to a crawl and even a halt in many states. Not only was the connectivity up to then unnoticed, but so was the potential speed at which the cascading effects forced closures of large banks across westernized digital nations. What took nine months to several years in 1929 looked well into happening within a week in the digitally interdependent cybered world of 2008 (Fortson 2007). In the cooperative city-states’ and dysfunctional badlands’ emergent topology of the global international system, most frameworks for national security response in the modern states have not appropriately adapted to the strategic imperatives of cybered conflict. Hindering this reconsideration of security is a dominant view across the westernized world’s security communities of a world of independent and well-governed nation-states with defined territories and clear distinctions between domestic and international functions. In this world, leaders face largely separated decisions across domains of foreign policy, domestic needs, and internal versus external security responsibilities. The prevalent models of international relations reinforce this neatly parsed worldview, generally making recommendations for strategy narrowly pitched at the decisions made by leaders in parameters distinguishable between peace or war, between domestic and foreign events, and between military and police missions. Much depends on the assumptions of strategic buffers such as time and distance to give policymakers the space to make decisions. Only in the nuclear era were these presumptions questioned. The solutions, however, involved mainly only two major superpowers, not any number of actors from small groups to whole regions. The traditional approaches help little in guiding responses to constant but episodic, cascading surprises emerging from the complexities of human perceptions across a globe and the vast array of underlying connections across Demchak, Chris C.. Wars of Disruption and Resilience : Cybered Conflict, Power, and National Security, University of Georgia Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/apus/detail.action?docID=3039013. Created from apus on 2019-07-01 09:06:22. Copyright © 2011. University of Georgia Press. All rights reserved. Globalization and Cybered Conflict [21] social systems. For example, while touting the real and theoretical economic benefits of free trade and the spread of unfettered globalization, Western economic models during the last forty years routinely left out any discussion of the social externalities now proving to be crucial to security. Searching the globe to set up widely dispersed corporate profit centers can spread ideas and infrastructure, but also resentment among displaced elites, workers, or communities. A real world example is the globalized breakdown of the international financial system in 2008. It began as a purely domestic crisis in the United States. Yet it spread in a rapid cascade to harm the economies of many nations seemingly unconnected to the United States and its mortgage-backed securities, astounding Western economists, financial advisors, and political leaders alike. The underlying global financial system had grown up under the myriad of linking and relinking decisions of thousands of profit-seeking independent actors. The complexity was used for profit margins, and the risks were not perceived. Societal turbulence and breakdown so apparent on the ground are never seen in macro or international economic theories, any more than buried deep domestic dependencies in critical global systems are discussed in traditional expressions of international relations. The legacy narrowness of such models individually inaccurately guides policymakers in today’s world of sieved borders and chronic violent threats from distant actors with cheap cybered access operating from politically dysfunctional areas. Today policymakers need to see national security more comprehensively. The well-established cognitive and institutional distinctions between national security assets and domestic police forces will give comparative advantage to cyber-enabled attackers anywhere cyberspace reaches in the world. Furthermore future integrated cybered conflicts are likely to emerge outside of war as well as during active hostilities and to involve many more actors than the main combatants. A key characteristic of global cybered conflict is the ease with which others uninvolved in the conflict can “pile on” and attack either or both sides at whim. The clearly emerging relatedness of many multilevel violent threats can no longer be bureaucratically parsed between domestic police forces with limited knowledge while cross-national computer assaults are left to specialized outward-looking national security forces focused on “wartime.” For the political or military leader in these city-states, the task of ensuring national security is made more difficult when no one theoretical approach offers sufficient guidance for the globalizing cross-domain, -scale, and Demchak, Chris C.. Wars of Disruption and Resilience : Cybered Conflict, Power, and National Security, University of Georgia Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/apus/detail.action?docID=3039013. Created from apus on 2019-07-01 09:06:22. Copyright © 2011. University of Georgia Press. All rights reserved. [22] chapter one -border chronic, endemic, serious violent national threats (Hasenclever, Mayer, and Rittberger 1996). The three major schools of international relations (realism, liberal institutionalism, and constructivism) emerged as recognizable fields during the past half century within the generally accepted framework of a world system of nation-states as the main threat actors and the relations between them as the major venue for violence. Not only is each school unable to uniquely address the foreign challenges, but all three approaches are uncomfortable with the domestic side of national security save as a venue for the study of national security decision makers. With the advent of modern networked digital data, however, new threats reach across the previously acceptable international-domestic divide. It is a tall order for both scholars and political leaders (Betts 2007). If physical destruction of a potential mass casualty threat is not possible, acceptable, or effective, leaders of democracies facing a world of chronic violent gray threats need broad integrated strategic theories to give them other options. Cronin argues the national responses must be both flexible and particularly multifaceted in their exploitation of globalization in order to meet global terrorism as it emerges (Cronin 2002–3). A city-state’s national security frameworks and institutions must handle both the enemies and the effects before, during, and after an attack precisely because of bad actor access to the ever more tightly linked critical processes within and among these massive citystates, for even a relatively moderate violent attack produces rippling nasty surprises. Increasingly the formerly separate domains of international relations, economic globalization, and domestic issues are interrelated or “multicausal,” and so are the threat profiles (Legro 2005). The prescriptions of the three main approaches of international relations as they are promoted today, however, are not. Each approach—realism, liberal institutionalism, and constructivism— is individually too narrow for the kind of actionable guidance needed today for such complex interrelatedness. Chapter 2 addresses these difficulties, and chapter 3 offers the security resilience strategy in response. CH A L L EN GE TO I N TER N ATIO N A L REL ATI O NS T H EO RY Complex puzzles need collective wisdom for resolution. Security with chronic, violent, semipredictable threats requires an array of tools drawn from experience and logic of deliberate violence at all levels of human behavior. Particu- Demchak, Chris C.. Wars of Disruption and Resilience : Cybered Conflict, Power, and National Security, University of Georgia Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/apus/detail.action?docID=3039013. Created from apus on 2019-07-01 09:06:22. Globalization and Cybered Conflict [23] larly needed are ways to unify the contributions of the three existing main theories of conflict to make them, in sum, flexible as well as multifaceted. Today the collaborative need for collective knowledge is well known and acknowledged in governments and corporate executive offices. “Countering the spread of the jihadist movement will require coordinated multilateral efforts that go well beyond operations to capture or kill terrorist leaders” (National Intelligence Estimate 2006). A number of scholars of international relations (ir) have offered a synthesis across elements taken from two or more of the main ir approaches.11 Unfortunately none of these proposals seemed to have flourished and dominated across the three main schools of ir in the United States as the remaining superpower. Perhaps it is because the proposing scholars are prone to reductionism, slicing off preferred aspects of each established approach but leaving too much aside that is emergent today. All three approaches have individual limitations as theory applicable to the emerging world of cybered conflict today. Copyright © 2011. University of Georgia Press. All rights reserved. Realism, Neo- or Otherwise First, the dominant approach to international relations in the United States, realism, is closely associated with the use of force (power) to solve a state’s security dilemmas arising from an anarchic world. This notion that ultimately security is based on the state’s use of coercion against otherwise unfettered threats in an anarchic international system permeates the vast literature sustaining the school’s long rise from the 1930s onward.12 In practice, this major explanation of war and security policies reached its apogee of applicable explanatory power for strategic decisions in the bipolarity of the Cold War. Realist scholars had some success in predicting the outcomes of two superpowers competing for primacy ultimately on the basis of the ability to rain mass 11. A comprehensive list of all scholars who have tried to do this exceeds the scope of this book. In principle the pursuit of scholarly publication is intended to further precisely this outcome (Legro 2005). 12. The wide variety of extensions of realism that emerged over the Cold War era and beyond are not addressed here in large part because the scholars considered realists tend to agree on only two major assumptions: actors of importance are states, and the world is anarchic, thus the emphasis on security and power. Demchak, Chris C.. Wars of Disruption and Resilience : Cybered Conflict, Power, and National Security, University of Georgia Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/apus/detail.action?docID=3039013. Created from apus on 2019-07-01 09:06:22. Copyright © 2011. University of Georgia Press. All rights reserved. [24] chapter one destruction from nuclear, ballistic-missile inventories.13 Misbehaving states, in the eyes of the dominant players of the international community, were not confused about which major state was a patron and which posed a clear physical threat. Although the product of individual actors behaving in their own self-interests and bounded by their attention and comprehension spans, states could be theoretically viewed as unitary actors. Thus, game theory and other forms of rational choice became part of the realist weltanschauung making state actions open to probabilities and mathematical prediction (Powell 1987; Achen 2005). A bipolar world was uniquely suited to realism’s strengths, and now, fiftyplus years later, even scholars of more liberal institutional or closeted cultural persuasions will still often use realist metaphors in their work. Identifying who is and is not a realist sometimes becomes more a matter of the emphasis given to force over money in alliance negotiations, engagement strategies, and strategic policy announcements. As a paradigm, realism was and remains so attractively elegant that its assumptions masking the complex realities of security on the ground took on and still retain the patina of greater objectivity and rigor. Even when realist analysis clearly missed major drivers of actual outcomes, the disconnect often was and still is simply overlooked as noise in the system from “lower” levels of systemic analysis. Thus, the looming potential for system change in the radicalization of mass social movements like terrorism and the massive explosion in technologies can be recast by senior realist scholars as either not important or mundane rational trends simply contributing to a country’s relative power. Waltz, for example, has argued that technology and its influences are subsystem variables ancillary to the higher-level realist focus on only systemic-level variables. In the not distant past, terrorists have been cast by realist scholars as rational optimizers who were unlikely to promote mass killing for fear of retribution (Sagan and Waltz 1995). Deterrence as a strategic option, for example, is particularly difficult for realist scholars to both analytically bound and practically employ in the emerging mass-cybered world because westernized notions of identifiable and negotiable “rational interests” are critical here. Some realists have remarked on the wider complexities beyond their theoretical paradigm. For example, two realist scholars do argue that reason may have little to do with the threat or 13. Seminal realist scholars include Waltz (1979), Mearsheimer (1994), and Van Evera (1994). Demchak, Chris C.. Wars of Disruption and Resilience : Cybered Conflict, Power, and National Security, University of Georgia Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/apus/detail.action?docID=3039013. Created from apus on 2019-07-01 09:06:22. Copyright © 2011. University of Georgia Press. All rights reserved. Globalization and Cybered Conflict [25] use of armed forces in deterrence or retaliation. But this acknowledgment of a shortcoming in realism’s applicability was married with a blunt endorsement of military force as an enduring aspect of international politics in pursuit of foreign policy goals (Huth and Russett 1984). Deterrence is so critical to the realist prescription of how to ensure security that failures here have sometimes been met with a resort to assertions rather than a reevaluation of the presumed applicability of realism to state security dilemmas everywhere. Moreover, the realist community’s development of a further distinction into defensive and offensive realism heralded a deepening desire to fit the rest of the world’s declining civility into a model of human behavior profoundly tied to who has military power (Copeland 2001). In the realist perspective, military force is integral to the overt and clearly stated threats of nations in conflict, and the identity of the attack target involving force must also be clearly defined (Huth and Russett 1984). Even the slightly more social “selective engagement” as a strategy intrinsically falls back on force in all cases. Troops and force are included—as essential tools—in a discussion about persuading allies to help stem the spread of nuclear, biological, and chemical (nbc) weapons (Art 1998–99). For example, a subtle logical dissonance appears in realism when scholars consider religious terrorism. Terrorists are made to fit within the niche of rational actors even though the authors may explicitly say the religious terrorists are not. Although an author may argue that deterrence “becomes nearly impossible” against the revenge and retribution motivations of religious terrorists, nonetheless rogue states and terrorists are perceived to be similar enough to put into the same targeting group. Furthermore, a last resort to the tactical use of nuclear attacks in response to terrorism is suggested (Art 1998–99). Realists have great trouble when pressed for policies to help national leaders be good realists in a world of suicide terrorists or widely anonymous cybered attacks. In some cases, critical practical or institutionalized national security functions are treated as noise below the level of the international system. In other cases, the recommendations are a mélange of measures left unconnected by the tenets of realism itself. These include prescriptions to increase budgets in intelligence intended to uncover hidden nuclear and biological weapons developments and to disable those efforts in rogue states or terrorist organizations, all with some reference to the use of military force (Art 1998–99). For example, selective engagement is characterized as the premier grand strategy for the United States, invoking the most appropriate goals for Demchak, Chris C.. Wars of Disruption and Resilience : Cybered Conflict, Power, and National Security, University of Georgia Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/apus/detail.action?docID=3039013. Created from apus on 2019-07-01 09:06:22. [26] chapter one the nation and best employing the nation’s military capability for support (Art 1998–99). Realist explanations cannot account for interstate cooperation, especially among historical, close-proximity adversaries, each independently armed.14 As Mastanduno indicated: Copyright © 2011. University of Georgia Press. All rights reserved. During the 1950s and 1960s, however, students of ir came to conceive of statecraft fairly narrowly, primarily as a problem involving the relationship between military instruments and military objective. Economic statecraft and the link between economic and security issues were largely ignored. By the 1970s and 1980s, specialists in ir became far more concerned with economic issues, and the study of ipe [international political economy] moved to the forefront of the discipline. However, the study of economic statecraft, and economic issues more generally, tended to be conducted separately from the study of military statecraft, and national security issues more generally. Rather than integrating these two concerns in the overall study of international politics, security studies and ipe progressed as separate scholarly activities. (Mastanduno 1998, 826) In particular, the often domestically refracted reasons for individual acceptance of suicide loosely associated with emerging headless, transnational, extremist, social movements have been deemed irrational by realists and, until the mid-2000’s, irrelevant for the security interests of major states. Similarly, the use of cybered means to undermine nations with more powerful militaries has been viewed up to recently as irrelevant unless the tools are clearly identified as having been used by major peer states and their military institutions. The focus on force is deeply engrained in the approach indeed. Yet both the inter-entity cooperation common to cities in large, loose, political systems and the individually pyrrhic bombings in massed public places are major influences on citizen and state behaviors domestically and abroad today. These behaviors do over time cumulate across an increasingly huge global population to change the international system. In short, while most major complexities were observed accurately at one point or another, the realist recommendations as a whole only superficially accommodated the con14. See Mearsheimer’s (1994) argument for the explanatory and logical poverty of other explanations. See also the elaboration of this difficulty by Wendt (1995). Demchak, Chris C.. Wars of Disruption and Resilience : Cybered Conflict, Power, and National Security, University of Georgia Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/apus/detail.action?docID=3039013. Created from apus on 2019-07-01 09:06:22. Copyright © 2011. University of Georgia Press. All rights reserved. Globalization and Cybered Conflict [27] cerns of institutionalists or constructivists. Realist scholars have tended to stay fundamentally in their theoretical comfort zone focused on force. Indeed, Jervis argues succinctly that the initial Bush polices in Iraq were precisely an expression of raw offensive realism and also therefore of a profound inability of the proponents of this paradigm to see the limitations of the paradigm for a post–Cold War era (Jervis 2003). Even when authors using the realist approach are trying to speak more broadly to situations where force does not actually happen, the use of force is embedded in prescriptions. For example, look closely at the assumptions underlying the following action-response realist parable involving deterrence and note the embedded use of force irrespective of other tools. First officials in an attacking state plan an attack on a state closely tied to a third state that will have to defend the target state. When leaders in the third state recognize the impending attack, they state a threat to retaliate or clearly imply one by moving their military forces in a way to forestall an attack (Huth and Russett 1984). Deterrence and therefore interruption of planned violence is, by realist accounts, achieved by force or its threats, not otherwise. Mearsheimer in his prescient article on the rise of nationalism after the end of the Cold War attributes its rebirth to elements quite unfamiliar to a realism approach, namely, affiliations and socially constructed resentments, as much as he discusses any security dilemma or economic deprivation (Mearsheimer 1990). Despite these observations, Mearsheimer remains wedded to the realist paradigm. Having leveled broadsides for years at the liberal institutionalists for ineffectiveness, only a few years after his nationalism piece, Mearsheimer (1994) castigated the only other intellectual peer competitor, the emerging school of constructivism, for their utopian and impractical approach. This singular focus on the use of force as the ultimate arbiter has had consequences beyond the Cold War in persuading some leaders to act. For a particularly pressing and troubling example, the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 can reasonably be characterized as a particularly fundamentalist kind of realism adopted by George W. Bush and his political advisers, most of whom were far from experienced internationalists (Jervis 2003). It proved a financial and political fiasco, with only one of three strategic paths open to the United States: simply leave a failing state, leave an intact Iraq under some kind of caretaker national government with international resources to replace the U.S. support, or leave with Iraq divided into ethnic ministates, preferably Demchak, Chris C.. Wars of Disruption and Resilience : Cybered Conflict, Power, and National Security, University of Georgia Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/apus/detail.action?docID=3039013. Created from apus on 2019-07-01 09:06:22. [28] chapter one each with some oil wells outright owned and defended.15 None of these are realist solutions to a realism-inspired fiasco. Rather, the attack was viewed as a mistake by realists primarily because of the fear induced in other states faced with the United States exhibiting excessive interventionism. The United States thereby increased the risk of hostile alliances among states balancing against it and possibly making it more difficult to sustain U.S. security elsewhere in the world (Layne 2006). The massive U.S. operational quagmire in Iraq was not explainable as an outcome by realist analysis. Insurgencies are by their very level of analysis irrelevant to the world system of anarchic states. Stalwart realists rarely entertain the less easily defined concerns of constructivists, and they will generally ignore the benefits of institutionalism except as they relate to power alliances.16 Leaders facing a complex world of chronic violent threats from social movements and cyberspace are not given much guidance if raw force will not clearly do the job. One might say realism offers a shiny tree ornament but no tree on which to hang it that accurately represents the emerging world faced by leaders now. Copyright © 2011. University of Georgia Press. All rights reserved. Liberal Institutionalism Scholars most associated with the liberal institutionalist subfield are slightly better at incorporating elements of realism and of constructivism into their prescriptions. This broader view is due not only to the approach’s early years but also to its resurgence in the post–World War II period. The original institutionalists were focused on using international institutions as a bulwark against interstate war. The League of Nations and later the United Nations were ideals whose origins began with the tireless efforts of scholars such as Woodrow Wilson. Human social relationships and their attendant interests writ large were 15. The third option, the soft partition, is the most institutionally and culturally sensitive outcome. Some scholars and observers have argued that this was the only real option from the outset, given the distribution of ethnic groups, oil fields, and artificiality of the borders of Iraq (Demchak 2006). 16. For example, although “liberal” goals may be included in a discussion presenting selective engagement as the best and most syncretic grand strategy (among seven) for the United States, rarely mentioned are the explicit and central insights of constructivism on the power of belief and cultural deep institutions to channel what actions are considered acceptable (Art 1998–99). Demchak, Chris C.. Wars of Disruption and Resilience : Cybered Conflict, Power, and National Security, University of Georgia Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/apus/detail.action?docID=3039013. Created from apus on 2019-07-01 09:06:22. Copyright © 2011. University of Georgia Press. All rights reserved. Globalization and Cybered Conflict [29] always fundamental to the approach, as was discomfort with, if not explicit rejection of, the international system as anarchic (Legro 2005). Today the modern institutionalist field is more closely associated with the comparative field of international political economy, redefining interests to emphasize capital flows and economic influences in security (Jönsson and Tallberg 2008). Institutionalists offer perplexed leaders facing the world of chronic violent threats a second shiny tree ornament that has no tree on which to hang it. In this case, the shiny thing is the idea of economic prosperity through internationally cooperative behaviors. The underlying presumption is that civil behavior emerges if economic prosperity is clearly on the rise collectively. Institutionalists reject the realist claims of anarchy in particular due to its lack of ground truth and its role as a fixation on sovereignty that undermines collective regional solutions to otherwise intractable problems. The post–World War II international system was clearly not a state-pursuing-its-own-security free-for-all. The norm of sovereignty and of independent state actors—essential to the realist anarchic international system—has been widely and frequently violated. The realist adherence to preserving sovereignty irrespective of the costs, or of possible alternative societally helpful institutional arrangements, amounts to “organized hypocrisy” (Krasner 1999).17 With interests recast as economic resources husbanded by organizations rather than related to power and force, institutionalist inquiries and recommendations run the gamut from mercenaries to Keynes (Avant 2005; Markwell 1995). Underlying their observations, however, is the “peasant as rational economic actor” notion by which agents with violent threats can be made to see—or made to act as if they see—the futility of further threatening behavior or the economic losses that any violence might produce. In this view, political and resource mechanisms of control are more important than power or belief motivations in producing security-relevant outcomes (Avant 2005). For the institutionalists, therefore, bad behavior is irrational if the proper incentives have been offered to move outcomes to the desired state in group and individual expected-utility curves. Bad actors are in that sense free riders for whom the proper material offers have not yet been collectively discerned, 17. Of course, to the extent that the field is focused on collective cross-cultural resolutions of conflict, this “hypocrisy” may not always be undesirable. The hypocrisy may be a useful coping mechanism often seen in domestic organizations to relieve otherwise paralyzing pressures for conflicting courses of action (Lipson 2007). Demchak, Chris C.. Wars of Disruption and Resilience : Cybered Conflict, Power, and National Security, University of Georgia Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/apus/detail.action?docID=3039013. Created from apus on 2019-07-01 09:06:22. [30] chapter one refined politically, financed in institutions, and then explicitly made clear. Institutionalists, however, have great difficulty offering political leaders effective strategic guidance if money in various institutionalized settings is not reducing threats from actors across the complex globally connected and demographically huge emerging world. Copyright © 2011. University of Georgia Press. All rights reserved. Constructivism Finally, constructivism suffers from field myopia as well, although more justifiably. The youngest of the three international relations subfields, constructivism, is still defining its focus on the otherwise missing, often ineluctable, underlying idea or “knowledge expressed as structure” aspects of human social systems (Wendt 1995; Legro 2005). Unlike scholars supporting the other approaches, these scholars can directly address the consequences for ir of the behaviors taken as “irrational” by realists and by institutionalists. From 2004 to 2009 the limited, and often transient, local cooperation of Iraqis with U.S. Allied Forces often was responding to something beyond force and money given the possible personal consequences for any Iraqi of being caught cooperating. This difficult-to-quantitatively-define motivation has been identified by cognition scholars as more “primitive and defensive,” and it has real behavior consequences (Armstrong 1999). For constructivists, it is “ideas all the way down (until you get to biology and natural resources)” (Wendt 1995). Yet, even more than realism and liberal institutionalism, this reborn scholarly sensitivity to the human culture and ideas variables in ir epitomizes the third beautiful tree ornament that has no strategic tree on which to hang. While occasionally claiming to embrace the other fields, the emerging field of constructivism itself has yet to blend its distinctive approach practically with the force and money central tenets of the other two approaches.18 Constructivism is based on presumptions that knowledge filtered by a variety of internalized or collectively socially constructed screens drives human decisions and thence behaviors. Constructivists accept that these screens could be cultural, 18. An early reflection of this desire not to be seen as orthogonally different is found in the works of one of the seminal authors of the field. While claiming distinctive insights for critical theorists and specifically the social structural approach of constructivism, Wendt then notes his constructivist commonality with Mearsheimer’s realism to include the anarchy of the international system and the primacy of states in analysis (Wendt 1995; Mearsheimer 1994). Demchak, Chris C.. Wars of Disruption and Resilience : Cybered Conflict, Power, and National Security, University of Georgia Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/apus/detail.action?docID=3039013. Created from apus on 2019-07-01 09:06:22. Copyright © 2011. University of Georgia Press. All rights reserved. Globalization and Cybered Conflict [31] organizational, circumstantial, or even emotional, and their exact form and implications are open to comparative empirical research. The field does not, however, try to make general one-size-fits-all prescriptions like realism nor to focus on one particular modality such as the institutions aimed at “peace through economic prosperity” preferred by liberal institutionalists. Furthermore, the immediate precursors to modern constructivism in ir incurred a dismal reputation in strategic circles after the U.S. war in Vietnam in the 1960s. Extensively using the guidance of sociologists and cultural anthropologists, the U.S. military adopted a “hearts and minds” policy that would, in the abstract, be familiar to modern constructivists. Yet this strategy was widely and unfairly castigated for its stunning failures to persuade villagers to support the government and to reject the overtures of the communist guerilla units spread out across the country (Sheehan 1988). The policy was initiated relatively late in the war. Its underlying “rational peasant” concept led the American military to label whole swathes of land containing thousands of Vietnamese still in their home villages as free-fire zones. This logic said that peasants were rational. Those who were offered “better” land elsewhere and yet refused the offer were demonstrating their rationality if they were already in agreement with the Vietcong. Therefore a refusal to move meant the rational peasant was already aligned with enemies. Hence any peasants who stayed in their villages after being warned of impending U.S. strikes were legitimate wartime targets for carpet bombing. Not taken into account in the Vietnam War until it was too late were the beliefs and structures that channel and reinforce individual and collective behaviors, the aspects of international relations emphasized by constructivists. The peasants who agreed to leave abandoned everything they knew, from their and their ancestors’ home to their skills in manipulating the precise conditions of their existing land for good crops. They would have been agreeing to move south to different land, conditions, social structures, and futures, all on the assurances of either corrupt local officials or very foreign U.S. military advisers. By the time the power of these cognitive factors was recognized, it was difficult to persuade peasants to risk yet more in standing up to the often equally intolerant Vietcong, especially after their village and family might have been carpet bombed (J. W. Gibson 1988; B. Palmer 1984). Despite the shortfalls in implementation, timing, political support, and military understanding demonstrated by the United States in the Vietnam War, the failure to produce solid peasant democrats was eventually blamed Demchak, Chris C.. Wars of Disruption and Resilience : Cybered Conflict, Power, and National Security, University of Georgia Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/apus/detail.action?docID=3039013. Created from apus on 2019-07-01 09:06:22. Copyright © 2011. University of Georgia Press. All rights reserved. [32] chapter one on the “hearts and minds” idea itself by the U.S. national security community dominated by realists. Culture as an analytical variable and guiding tool for foreign or any policy was profoundly damaged. Its study outside of area studies languished, devalued for twenty-five years in American political science. The loss in Vietnam was not just strategic in military terms; it was also a strategic loss in the diversity of international relations thinking of America. During the rest of the Cold War era, the reputational costs of studying culture outside of various area studies were daunting to American scholars and practitioners. Until well into the 1990s, it was common to attribute cultural phenomena to largely economic motivations, saying, for example, terrorists were likely to be open to recruitment simply because they were poor (Sageman 2004). During this time, American scholars who took culture to have independent variable characteristics often used acceptable reformulations such as organizational doctrine or socializations, emergent nationalism, or even cognitive international relations theory as legitimizing overlays to avoid the taint of the older “hearts and minds” focus seen to have failed in Vietnam.19 Until the mid-2000s, U.S. policy did not explicitly endorse a cultural perspective in any specific foreign policy. The debacle of the unexpected Iraqi insurgency beginning in 2004 forced a bottom-up reassessment by desperate military leaders. In Iraq, as in Vietnam, paying attention to the values and cultural institutions of the local populace came late in the overall theater and strategy, long after coercion and economic plans laden with ignorance and hubris were imposed.20 U.S. experiences in Iraq from 2004 to 2008 are better explained by constructivist approaches than by the others, but the corresponding solutions are not easily translated from the constructivists’ broad concerns to tools providing actionable guidance for the beleaguered leader. For example, in a 2008 document by the U.S. Congress House Armed Services Committee, the authors observed, “The first rule of war is to understand the nature of the enemy; today that would include Al Qaeda’s intent to spread fear and our tendency to exaggerate the actual danger” (U.S. Congress 2008). While that 19. Even Posen’s (1986) famous work on doctrine would not offend today’s constructivist. Fortunately, American political science had the British school to keep the lamp in the window for when we would need it in the post–Cold War period (Copeland 2003; Buzan 2001; Croft 2006). 20. These points are made in the updated preface to Nagl’s (2002) book on insurgencies and culture. Demchak, Chris C.. Wars of Disruption and Resilience : Cybered Conflict, Power, and National Security, University of Georgia Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/apus/detail.action?docID=3039013. Created from apus on 2019-07-01 09:06:22. Globalization and Cybered Conflict [33] formulation is more constructivist than it is not, the panel did not progress far in implementing these observations to fix the patently clear “U.S. institutional weaknesses in the implementation of any security policy.” SYN CRE TIC REFR A M I N G : SECU RIT Y RESILIEN CE Copyright © 2011. University of Georgia Press. All rights reserved. S TR ATEGY F O R A C YBERED WO RL D Cyber power is the national ability to disrupt this obscured bad actor somewhere in the digitized globe, whether nonstate or state, in proportion to the actor’s motivations or capabilities to attack with violent effects, and yet be resilient against imposed or enhanced nasty surprises across all critical nationally sustaining systems. This enormously complex challenge requires an approach that deliberately reaches across disciplinary boundaries and epistemologies to integrate competing theories and methods (Tremonte and Racioppi 2008). A new framework needs to grow with the new world order, whether or not it is the one envisioned by established scholars (Kolodziej 2005). When the three schools of international relations theory are adequately seen as complementary rather than competing, a path is formed by which scholars and the policy community can more consensually explain how to prepare for the surprises of the emerging interdependent world. This process of fusion rather than distinction or highlighting is the essence of a “syncretic” approach that aims to harmonize conflicting explanations.21 It is essential that this fusion emerge with the accelerating globalization, as the new surprises challenge old approaches. First, the syncretic security approach incorporates each main ir school in toto as opposed to a synthetic approach that selec...
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