Asia and Europe - Kissinger

 ASIA AND EUROPE: DIFFERENT CONCEPTS OF BALANCE OF POWER The term “Asia” ascribes a deceptive coherence to a disparate region. Until the arrival of modern Western powers, no Asian language had a word for “Asia”; none of the peoples of what are now Asia’s nearly fifty sovereign states conceived of themselves as inhabiting a single “continent” or region requiring solidarity with all the others. As “the East,” it has never been clearly parallel to “the West.” There has been no common religion, not even one splintered into different branches as is Christianity in the West. Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity all thrive in different parts of Asia. There is no memory of a common empire comparable to that of Rome. Across Northeast, East, Southeast, South, and Central Asia, prevailing major ethnic, linguistic, religious, social, and cultural differences have been deepened, often bitterly, by the wars of modern history. The political and economic map of Asia illustrates the region’s complex tapestry. It comprises industrially and technologically advanced countries in Japan, the Republic of Korea, and Singapore, with economies and standards of living rivaling those of Europe; three countries of continental scale in China, India, and Russia; two large archipelagoes (in addition to Japan), the Philippines and Indonesia, composed of thousands of islands and standing astride the main sea-lanes; three ancient nations with populations approximating those of France or Italy in Thailand, Vietnam, and Myanmar; huge Australia and pastoral New Zealand, with largely European-descended populations; and North Korea, a Stalinist family dictatorship bereft of industry and technology except for a nuclear weapons program. A large Muslim-majority population prevails across Central Asia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Malaysia, and Indonesia, and sizeable Muslim minorities exist in India, China, Myanmar, Thailand, and the Philippines. The global order during the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century was predominantly European, designed to maintain a rough balance of power between the major European countries. Outside their own continent, the European states built colonies and justified their actions under various versions of their so-called civilizing mission. From the perspective of the twenty-first century, in which Asian nations are rising in wealth, power, and confidence, it may seem improbable that colonialism gained such force or that its institutions were treated as a normal mechanism of international life. Material factors alone cannot explain it; a sense of mission and intangible psychological momentum also played a role. The pamphlets and treatises of the colonial powers from the dawn of the twentieth century reveal a remarkable arrogance, to the effect that they were entitled to shape a world order by their maxims. Accounts of China or India condescendingly defined a European mission to educate traditional cultures to higher levels of civilization. European administrators with relatively small staffs redrew the borders of ancient nations, oblivious that this might be an abnormal, unwelcome, or illegitimate development. At the dawn of what is now called the modern age in the fifteenth century, a confident, fractious, territorially divided West had set sail to reconnoiter the globe and to improve, exploit, and “civilize” the lands it came upon. It impressed upon the peoples it encountered views of religion, science, commerce, governance, and diplomacy shaped by the Western historical experience, which it took to be the capstone of human achievement. The West expanded with the familiar hallmarks of colonialism—avariciousness, cultural chauvinism, lust for glory. But it is also true that its better elements tried to lead a kind of global tutorial in an intellectual method that encouraged skepticism and a body of political and diplomatic practices ultimately including democracy. It all but ensured that, after long periods of subjugation, the colonized peoples would eventually demand—and achieve—self-determination. Even during their most brutal depredations, the expansionist powers put forth, especially in Britain, a vision that at some point conquered peoples would begin to participate in the fruits of a common global system. Finally recoiling from the sordid practice of slavery, the West produced what no other slaveholding civilization had: a global abolition movement based on a conviction of common humanity and the inherent dignity of the individual. Britain, rejecting its previous embrace of the despicable trade, took the lead in enforcing a new norm of human dignity, abolishing slavery in its empire and interdicting slave-trading ships on the high seas. The distinctive combination of overbearing conduct, technological prowess, idealistic humanitarianism, and revolutionary intellectual ferment proved one of the shaping factors of the modern world. With the exception of Japan, Asia was a victim of the international order imposed by colonialism, not an actor in it. Thailand sustained its independence but, unlike Japan, was too weak to participate in the balance of power as a system of regional order. China’s size prevented it from full colonization, but it lost control over key aspects of its domestic affairs. Until the end of World War II, most of Asia conducted its policies as an adjunct of European powers or, in the case of the Philippines, of the United States. The conditions for Westphalian-style diplomacy only began to emerge with the decolonization that followed the devastation of the European order by two world wars. The process of emancipation from the prevalent regional order was violent and bloody: the Chinese civil war (1927–49), the Korean War (1950–53), a Sino-Soviet confrontation (roughly 1955–80), revolutionary guerrilla insurgencies all across Southeast Asia, the Vietnam War (1961– 75), four India-Pakistan wars (1947, 1965, 1971, and 1999), a Chinese-Indian war (1962), a Chinese-Vietnamese war (1979), and the depredations of the genocidal Khmer Rouge (1975–79). After decades of war and revolutionary turmoil, Asia has transformed itself dramatically. The rise of the “Asian Tigers,” evident from 1970, involving Hong Kong, the Republic of Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, and Thailand, brought prosperity and economic dynamism into view. Japan adopted democratic institutions and built an economy rivaling and in some cases surpassing those of Western nations. In 1979, China changed course and, under Deng Xiaoping, proclaimed a nonideological foreign policy and a policy of economic reforms that, continued and accelerated under his successors, have had a profound transformative effect on China and the world. As these changes unfolded, national-interest-based foreign policy premised on Westphalian principles seemed to have prevailed in Asia. Unlike in the Middle East, where almost all the states are threatened by militant challenges to their legitimacy, in Asia the state is treated as the basic unit of international and domestic politics. The various nations emerging from the colonial period generally affirmed one another’s sovereignty and committed to noninterference in one another’s domestic affairs; they followed the norms of international organizations and built regional or interregional economic and social organizations. In this vein a top Chinese military official, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Deputy Chief of General Staff Qi Jianguo, wrote in a major January 2013 policy review that one of the primary challenges of the contemporary era is to uphold “the basic principle of modern international relations firmly established in the 1648 ‘Treaty of Westphalia,’ especially the principles of sovereignty and equality.” Asia has emerged as among the Westphalian system’s most significant legacies: historic, and often historically antagonistic, peoples are organizing themselves as sovereign states and their states as regional groupings. In Asia, far more than in Europe, not to speak of the Middle East, the maxims of the Westphalian model of international order find their contemporary expression—including doctrines since questioned by many in the West as excessively focused on the national interest or insufficiently protective of human rights. Sovereignty, in many cases wrought only recently from colonial rule, is treated as having an absolute character. The goal of state policy is not to transcend the national interest—as in the fashionable concepts in Europe or the United States—but to pursue it energetically and with conviction. Every government dismisses foreign criticism of its internal practices as a symptom of just-surmounted colonial tutelage. Thus even when neighboring states’ domestic actions are perceived as excesses—as they have been, for example, in Myanmar—they are treated as an occasion for quiet diplomatic intercession, not overt pressure, much less forcible intervention. At the same time, an element of implicit threat is ever present. China affirms explicitly, and all other key players implicitly, the option of military force in the pursuit of core national interests. Military budgets are rising. National rivalries, as in the South China Sea and Northeast Asian waters, have generally been conducted with the methods of nineteenth-century European diplomacy; force has not been excluded, though its application has been restrained, if tenuously, as the years go by. Hierarchy, not sovereign equality, was the organizing principle of Asia’s historical international systems. Power was demonstrated by the deference shown to a ruler and the structures of authority that recognized his overlordship, not the delineation of specific borders on a map. Empires spread their trade and their political writ, soliciting the alignment of smaller political units. For the peoples who existed at the intersection of two or more imperial orders, the path to independence was often to enroll as a nominal subordinate in more than one sphere (an art still remembered and practiced today in some quarters). In Asia’s historical diplomatic systems, whether based on Chinese or Hindu models, monarchy was considered an expression of divinity or, at the very least, a kind of paternal authority; tangible expressions of tribute were thought to be owed to superior countries by their inferiors. This theoretically left no room for ambiguity as to the nature of regional power relationships, leading to a series of rigid alignments. In practice, however, these principles were applied with remarkable creativity and fluidity. In Northeast Asia, the Ryukyu Kingdom for a time paid tribute to both Japan and China. In the northern hills of Burma, tribes secured a form of de facto autonomy by pledging their loyalty simultaneously to the Burmese royal court and the Chinese Emperor (and generally not straining to follow the dictates of either). For centuries, Nepal skillfully balanced its diplomatic posture between the ruling dynasties in China and those in India—offering letters and gifts that were interpreted as tribute in China but recorded as evidence of equal exchanges in Nepal, then holding out a special tie with China as a guarantee of Nepal’s independence vis-à-vis India. Thailand, eyed as a strategic target by expanding Western empires in the nineteenth century, avoided colonization altogether through an even more elaborate strategy of affirming cordial ties with all foreign powers at once—welcoming foreign advisors from multiple competing Western states into its court even while sending tribute missions to China and retaining Hindu priests of Indian descent for the royal household. (The intellectual suppleness and emotional forbearance demanded by this balancing strategy were all the more remarkable given that the Thai King was himself regarded as a divine figure.) Any concept of a regional order was considered too inhibiting of the flexibility demanded from diplomacy. Against this backdrop of subtle and diverse legacies, the grid of Westphalian sovereign states on a map of Asia presents an oversimplified picture of regional realities. It cannot capture the diversity of aspirations that leaders bring to their tasks or the combination of punctilious attention to hierarchy and protocol with adroit maneuver that characterizes much of Asian diplomacy. It is the fundamental framework of international life in Asia. But statehood there is also infused with a set of cultural legacies of a greater diversity and immediacy than perhaps any other region. This is underscored by the experiences of two of Asia’s major nations, Japan and India

Kissinger

 CYBER TECHNOLOGY AND WORLD ORDER For most of history, technological change unfolded over decades and centuries of incremental advances that refined and combined existing technologies. Even radical innovations could over time be fitted within previous tactical and strategic doctrines: tanks were considered in terms of precedents drawn from centuries of cavalry warfare; airplanes could be conceptualized as another form of artillery, battleships as mobile forts, and aircraft carriers as airstrips. For all their magnification of destructive power, even nuclear weapons are in some respects an extrapolation from previous experience. What is new in the present era is the rate of change of computing power and the expansion of information technology into every sphere of existence. Reflecting in the 1960s on his experiences as an engineer at the Intel Corporation, Gordon Moore concluded that the trend he had observed would continue at regular intervals to double the capacity of computer processing units every two years. “Moore’s Law” has proved astoundingly prophetic. Computers have shrunk in size, declined in cost, and grown exponentially faster to the point where advanced computer processing units can now be embedded in almost any object—phones, watches, cars, home appliances, weapons systems, unmanned aircraft, and the human body itself. The revolution in computing is the first to bring so many individuals and processes into the same medium of communication and to translate and track their actions in a single technological language. Cyberspace—a word coined, at that point as an essentially hypothetical concept, only in the 1980s— has colonized physical space and, at least in major urban centers, is beginning to merge with it. Communication across it, and between its exponentially proliferating nodes, is near instantaneous. As tasks that were primarily manual or paper based a generation ago—reading, shopping, education, friendship, industrial and scientific research, political campaigns, finance, government record keeping, surveillance, military strategy—are filtered through the computing realm, human activity becomes increasingly “datafied” and part of a single “quantifiable, analyzable” system. This is all the more so as, with the number of devices connected to the Internet now roughly ten billion and projected to rise to fifty billion by 2020, an “Internet of Things” or an “Internet of Everything” looms. Innovators now forecast a world of ubiquitous computing, with miniature dataprocessing devices embedded in everyday objects—“smart door locks, toothbrushes, wristwatches, fitness trackers, smoke detectors, surveillance cameras, ovens, toys and robots”—or floating through the air, surveying and shaping their environment in the form of “smart dust.” Each object is to be connected to the Internet and programmed to communicate with a central server or other networked devices. The revolution’s effects extend to every level of human organization. Individuals wielding smartphones (and currently an estimated one billion people do) now possess information and analytical capabilities beyond the range of many intelligence agencies a generation ago. Corporations aggregating and monitoring the data exchanged by these individuals wield powers of influence and surveillance exceeding those of many contemporary states and of even more traditional powers. And governments, wary of ceding the new field to rivals, are propelled outward into a cyber realm with as yet few guidelines or restraints. As with any technological innovation, the temptation will be to see this new realm as a field for strategic advantage. These changes have occurred so rapidly as to outstrip most attempts by those without technological expertise to comprehend their broader consequences. They draw humanity into regions hitherto unexplained, indeed unconceived. As a result, many of the most revolutionary technologies and techniques are currently limited in their use only by the capability and the discretion of the most technologically advanced. No government, even the most totalitarian, has been able to arrest the flow or to resist the trend to push ever more of its operations into the digital domain. Most of the democracies have an ingrained instinct that an attempt to curtail the effects of an information revolution would be impossible and perhaps also immoral. Most of the countries outside the liberal-democratic world have set aside attempts to shut out these changes and turned instead to mastering them. Every country, company, and individual is now being enlisted in the technological revolution as either a subject or an object. What matters for the purpose of this book is the effect on prospects for international order. The contemporary world inherits the legacy of nuclear weapons capable of destroying civilized life. But as catastrophic as their implications were, their significance and use could still be analyzed in terms of separable cycles of war and peace. The new technology of the Internet opens up entirely new vistas. Cyberspace challenges all historical experience. It is ubiquitous but not threatening in itself; its menace depends on its use. The threats emerging from cyberspace are nebulous and undefined and may be difficult to attribute. The pervasiveness of networked communications in the social, financial, industrial, and military sectors has vast beneficial aspects; it has also revolutionized vulnerabilities. Outpacing most rules and regulations (and indeed the technical comprehension of many regulators), it has, in some respects, created the state of nature about which philosophers have speculated and the escape from which, according to Hobbes, provided the motivating force for creating a political order. Before the cyber age, nations’ capabilities could still be assessed through an amalgam of manpower, equipment, geography, economics, and morale. There was a clear distinction between periods of peace and war. Hostilities were triggered by defined events and carried out with strategies for which some intelligible doctrine had been formulated. Intelligence services played a role mainly in assessing, and occasionally in disrupting, adversaries’ capabilities; their activities were limited by implicit common standards of conduct or, at a minimum, by common experiences evolved over decades. Internet technology has outstripped strategy or doctrine—at least for the time being. In the new era, capabilities exist for which there is as yet no common interpretation—or even understanding. Few if any limits exist among those wielding them to define either explicit or tacit restraints. When individuals of ambiguous affiliation are capable of undertaking actions of increasing ambition and intrusiveness, the very definition of state authority may turn ambiguous. The complexity is compounded by the fact that it is easier to mount cyberattacks than to defend against them, possibly encouraging an offensive bias in the construction of new capabilities. The danger is compounded by the plausible deniability of those suspected of such actions and by the lack of international agreements for which, even if reached, there is no present system of enforcement. A laptop can produce global consequences. A solitary actor with enough computing power is able to access the cyber domain to disable and potentially destroy critical infrastructure from a position of near-complete anonymity. Electric grids could be surged and power plants disabled through actions undertaken exclusively outside a nation’s physical territory (or at least its territory as traditionally conceived). Already, an underground hacker syndicate has proved capable of penetrating government networks and disseminating classified information on a scale sufficient to affect diplomatic conduct. Stuxnet, an example of a state-backed cyberattack, succeeded in disrupting and delaying Iranian nuclear efforts, by some accounts to an extent rivaling the effects of a limited military strike. The botnet attack from Russia on Estonia in 2007 paralyzed communications for days. Such a state of affairs, even if temporarily advantageous to the advanced countries, cannot continue indefinitely. The road to a world order may be long and uncertain, but no meaningful progress can be made if one of the most pervasive elements of international life is excluded from serious dialogue. It is highly improbable that all parties, especially those shaped by different cultural traditions, will arrive independently at the same conclusions about the nature and permissible uses of their new intrusive capacities. Some attempt at charting a common perception of our new condition is essential. In its absence, the parties will continue to operate on the basis of separate intuitions, magnifying the prospects of a chaotic outcome. For actions undertaken in the virtual, networked world are capable of generating pressures for countermeasures in physical reality, especially when they have the potential to inflict damage of a nature previously associated with armed attack. Absent some articulation of limits and agreement on mutual rules of restraint, a crisis situation is likely to arise, even unintentionally; the very concept of international order may be subject to mounting strains. In other categories of strategic capabilities, governments have come to recognize the self-defeating nature of unconstrained national conduct. The more sustainable course is to pursue, even among potential adversaries, a mixture of deterrence and mutual restraint, coupled with measures to prevent a crisis arising from misinterpretation or miscommunication. Cyberspace has become strategically indispensable. At this writing, users, whether individuals, corporations, or states, rely on their own judgment in conducting their activities. The Commander of U.S. Cyber Command has predicted that “the next war will begin in cyberspace.” It will not be possible to conceive of international order when the region through which states’ survival and progress are taking place remains without any international standards of conduct and is left to unilateral decisions. The history of warfare shows that every technological offensive capability will eventually be matched and offset by defensive measures, although not every country will be equally able to afford them. Does this mean that technologically less advanced countries must shelter under the protection of high-tech societies? Is the outcome to be a plethora of tense power balances? Deterrence, which, in the case of nuclear weapons, took the form of balancing destructive powers, cannot be applied by direct analogy, because the biggest danger is an attack without warning that may not reveal itself until the threat has already been implemented. Nor is it possible to base deterrence in cyberspace on symmetrical retaliation, as is the case with nuclear weapons. If a cyberattack is limited to a particular function or extent, a “response in kind” may have totally different implications for the United States and for the aggressor. For example, if the financial architecture of a major industrialized economy is undermined, is the victim entitled only to counterattack against the potentially negligible comparable assets of its attacker? Or only against the computers engaged in the attack? Because neither of these is likely to be a sufficient deterrent, the question then turns to whether “virtual” aggression warrants “kinetic” force in response—and to what degree and by what equations of equivalence. A new world of deterrence theory and strategic doctrine now in its infancy requires urgent elaboration. In the end, a framework for organizing the global cyber environment will be imperative. It may not keep pace with the technology itself, but the process of defining it will serve to educate leaders of its dangers and the consequences. Even if agreements carry little weight in the event of a confrontation, they may at least prevent sliding into an irretrievable conflict produced by misunderstanding. The dilemma of such technologies is that it is impossible to establish rules of conduct unless a common understanding of at least some of the key capabilities exists. But these are precisely the capabilities the major actors will be reluctant to disclose. The United States has appealed to China for restraint in purloining trade secrets via cyber intrusions, arguing that the scale of activity is unprecedented. Yet to what extent is the United States prepared to disclose its own cyber intelligence efforts? In this manner, asymmetry and a kind of congenital world disorder are built into relations between cyber powers both in diplomacy and in strategy. The emphasis of many strategic rivalries is shifting from the physical to the information realm, in the collection and processing of data, the penetration of networks, and the manipulation of psychology. Absent articulation of some rules of international conduct, a crisis will arise from the inner dynamics of the system. THE HUMAN FACTOR From the opening of the modern era in the sixteenth century, political philosophers have debated the issue of the relationship of the human being to the circumstances in which he finds himself. Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau advanced a biological-psychological portrait of human consciousness and derived their political positions from this starting point. The American Founders, notably Madison in Federalist 10, did the same. They traced the evolution of society through factors that were “sown in the nature of man”: each individual’s powerful yet fallible faculty of reason and his inherent “self-love,” from the interaction of which “different opinions will be formed”; and humanity’s diversity of capabilities, from which “the possession of different degrees and kinds of property immediately results” and with them a “division of the society into different interests and parties.” Though these thinkers differed in their analyses of specific factors and in the conclusions they drew, all framed their concepts in terms of a humanity whose inherent nature and experience of reality were timeless and unchanging. In the contemporary world, human consciousness is shaped through an unprecedented filter. Television, computers, and smartphones compose a trifecta offering nearly constant interaction with a screen throughout the day. Human interactions in the physical world are now pushed relentlessly into the virtual world of networked devices. Recent studies suggest that adult Americans spend on average roughly half of their waking hours in front of a screen, and the figure continues to grow. What is the impact of this cultural upheaval on relations between states? The policymaker undertakes multiple tasks, many of them shaped by his society’s history and culture. He must first of all make an analysis of where his society finds itself. This is inherently where the past meets the future; therefore such a judgment cannot be made without an instinct for both of these elements. He must then try to understand where that trajectory will take him and his society. He must resist the temptation to identify policymaking with projecting the familiar into the future, for on that road lies stagnation and then decline. Increasingly in a time of technological and political upheaval, wisdom counsels that a different path must be chosen. By definition, in leading a society from where it is to where it has never been, a new course presents advantages and disadvantages that will always seem closely balanced. To undertake a journey on a road never before traveled requires character and courage: character because the choice is not obvious; courage because the road will be lonely at first. And the statesman must then inspire his people to persist in the endeavor. Great statesmen (Churchill, both Roosevelts, de Gaulle, and Adenauer) had these qualities of vision and determination; in today’s society, it is increasingly difficult to develop them. For all the great and indispensable achievements the Internet has brought to our era, its emphasis is on the actual more than the contingent, on the factual rather than the conceptual, on values shaped by consensus rather than by introspection. Knowledge of history and geography is not essential for those who can evoke their data with the touch of a button. The mindset for walking lonely political paths may not be self-evident to those who seek confirmation by hundreds, sometimes thousands of friends on Facebook. In the Internet age, world order has often been equated with the proposition that if people have the ability to freely know and exchange the world’s information, the natural human drive toward freedom will take root and fulfill itself, and history will run on autopilot, as it were. But philosophers and poets have long separated the mind’s purview into three components: information, knowledge, and wisdom. The Internet focuses on the realm of information, whose spread it facilitates exponentially. Ever-more-complex functions are devised, particularly capable of responding to questions of fact, which are not themselves altered by the passage of time. Search engines are able to handle increasingly complex questions with increasing speed. Yet a surfeit of information may paradoxically inhibit the acquisition of knowledge and push wisdom even further away than it was before. The poet T. S. Eliot captured this in his “Choruses from ‘The Rock’”: Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information? Facts are rarely self-explanatory; their significance, analysis, and interpretation—at least in the foreign policy world—depend on context and relevance. As ever more issues are treated as if of a factual nature, the premise becomes established that for every question there must be a researchable answer, that problems and solutions are not so much to be thought through as to be “looked up.” But in the relations between states—and in many other fields—information, to be truly useful, must be placed within a broader context of history and experience to emerge as actual knowledge. And a society is fortunate if its leaders can occasionally rise to the level of wisdom. The acquisition of knowledge from books provides an experience different from the Internet. Reading is relatively time-consuming; to ease the process, style is important. Because it is not possible to read all books on a given subject, much less the totality of all books, or to organize easily everything one has read, learning from books places a premium on conceptual thinking—the ability to recognize comparable data and events and project patterns into the future. And style propels the reader into a relationship with the author, or with the subject matter, by fusing substance and aesthetics. Traditionally, another way of acquiring knowledge has been through personal conversations. The discussion and exchange of ideas has for millennia provided an emotional and psychological dimension in addition to the factual content of the information exchanged. It supplies intangibles of conviction and personality. Now the culture of texting produces a curious reluctance to engage in face-to-face interaction, especially on a one-to-one basis. The computer has, to a considerable extent, solved the problem of acquiring, preserving, and retrieving information. Data can be stored in effectively unlimited quantities and in manageable form. The computer makes available a range of data unattainable in the age of books. It packages it effectively; style is no longer needed to make it accessible, nor is memorization. In dealing with a single decision separated from its context, the computer supplies tools unimaginable even a decade ago. But it also shrinks perspective. Because information is so accessible and communication instantaneous, there is a diminution of focus on its significance, or even on the definition of what is significant. This dynamic may encourage policymakers to wait for an issue to arise rather than anticipate it, and to regard moments of decision as a series of isolated events rather than part of a historical continuum. When this happens, manipulation of information replaces reflection as the principal policy tool. In the same way, the Internet has a tendency to diminish historical memory. The phenomenon has been described as follows: “People forget items they think will be available externally and remember items they think will not be available.” By moving so many items into the realm of the available, the Internet reduces the impulse to remember them. Communications technology threatens to diminish the individual’s capacity for an inward quest by increasing his reliance on technology as a facilitator and mediator of thought. Information at one’s fingertips encourages the mindset of a researcher but may diminish the mindset of a leader. A shift in human consciousness may change the character of individuals and the nature of their interactions, and so begin to alter the human condition itself. Did people in the age of printing see the same world as their medieval forefathers? Is the optical perception of the world altered in the age of the computer? Western history and psychology have heretofore treated truth as independent of the personality and prior experience of the observer. Yet our age is on the verge of a changed conception of the nature of truth. Nearly every website contains some kind of customization function based on Internet tracing codes designed to ascertain a user’s background and preferences. These methods are intended to encourage users “to consume more content” and, in so doing, be exposed to more advertising, which ultimately drives the Internet economy. These subtle directions are in accordance with a broader trend to manage the traditional understanding of human choice. Goods are sorted and prioritized to present those “which you would like,” and online news is presented as “news which will best suit you.” Two different people appealing to a search engine with the same question do not necessarily receive the same answers. The concept of truth is being relativized and individualized—losing its universal character. Information is presented as being free. In fact, the recipient pays for it by supplying data to be exploited by persons unknown to him, in ways that further shape the information being offered to him. Whatever the utility of this approach in the realm of consumption, its effect on policymaking may prove transformative. The difficult choices of policymaking are always close. Where, in a world of ubiquitous social networks, does the individual find the space to develop the fortitude to make decisions that, by definition, cannot be based on a consensus? The adage that prophets are not recognized in their own time is true in that they operate beyond conventional conception—that is what made them prophets. In our era, the lead time for prophets might have disappeared altogether. The pursuit of transparency and connectivity in all aspects of existence, by destroying privacy, inhibits the development of personalities with the strength to take lonely decisions. American elections—especially presidential elections—represent another aspect of this evolution. It has been reported that in 2012 the election campaigns had files on some tens of millions of potentially independent voters. Drawn from research in social networks, open public files, and medical records, these files amounted to a profile for each, probably more precise than the target person would have been capable of doing from his own memory. This permitted the campaigns to choose the technology of their appeals—whether to rely on personal visits by committed friends (also discovered via the Internet), personalized letters (drawn from social network research), or group meetings. Presidential campaigns are on the verge of turning into media contests between master operators of the Internet. What once had been substantive debates about the content of governance will reduce candidates to being spokesmen for a marketing effort pursued by methods whose intrusiveness would have been considered only a generation ago the stuff of science fiction. The candidates’ main role may become fund-raising rather than the elaboration of issues. Is the marketing effort designed to convey the candidate’s convictions, or are the convictions expressed by the candidate the reflections of a “big data” research effort into individuals’ likely preferences and prejudices? Can democracy avoid an evolution toward a demagogic outcome based on emotional mass appeal rather than the reasoned process the Founding Fathers imagined? If the gap between the qualities required for election and those essential for the conduct of office becomes too wide, the conceptual grasp and sense of history that should be part of foreign policy may be lost—or else the cultivation of these qualities may take so much of a president’s first term in office as to inhibit a leading role for the United States. 

FOREIGN POLICY IN THE DIGITAL ERA Thoughtful observers have viewed the globalizing transformations ushered in by the rise of the Internet and advanced computing technology as the beginning of a new era of popular empowerment and progress toward peace. They hail the ability of new technologies to enable the individual and to propel transparency—whether through the publicizing of abuses by authorities or the erosion of cultural barriers of misunderstanding. Optimists point, with some justification, to the startling new powers of communication gained through instantaneous global networks. They stress the ability of computer networks and “smart” devices to create new social, economic, and environmental efficiencies. They look forward to unlocking previously insoluble technical problems by harnessing the brainpower of networked multitudes. One line of thinking holds that similar principles of networked communication, if applied correctly to the realm of international affairs, could help solve age-old problems of violent conflict. Traditional ethnic and sectarian rivalries may be muted in the Internet age, this theory posits, because “people who try to perpetuate myths about religion, culture, ethnicity or anything else will struggle to keep their narratives afloat amid a sea of newly informed listeners. With more data, everyone gains a better frame of reference.” It will be possible to temper national rivalries and resolve historical disputes because “with the technological devices, platforms and databases we have today, it will be much more difficult for governments in the future to argue over claims like these, not just because of permanent evidence but because everyone else will have access to the same source material.” In this view, the spread of networked digital devices will become a positive engine of history: new networks of communication will curtail abuses, soften social and political contradictions, and help heretofore-disunited parts cohere into a more harmonious global system. The optimism of this perspective replicates the best aspects of Woodrow Wilson’s prophecy of a world united by democracy, open diplomacy, and common rules. As a blueprint for political or social order, it also raises some of the same questions as Wilson’s original vision about the distinction between the practical and the aspirational. Conflicts within and between societies have occurred since the dawn of civilization. The causes of these conflicts have not been limited to an absence of information or an insufficient ability to share it. They have arisen not only between societies that do not understand each other but between those that understand each other only too well. Even with the same source material to examine, individuals have disagreed about its meaning or the subjective value of what it depicts. Where values, ideals, or strategic objectives are in fundamental contradiction, exposure and connectivity may on occasion fuel confrontations as much as assuage them. New social and information networks spur growth and creativity. They allow individuals to express views and report injustices that might otherwise go unheeded. In crisis situations, they offer a crucial ability to communicate quickly and to publicize events and policies reliably—potentially preventing the outbreak of a conflict through misunderstanding. Yet they also bring conflicting, occasionally incompatible value systems into ever closer contact. The advent of Internet news and commentary and data-driven election strategies has not noticeably softened the partisan aspect of American politics; if anything, it has provided a larger audience to the extremes. Internationally, some expressions that once passed unknown and unremarked are now publicized worldwide and used as pretexts for violent agitation—as occurred in parts of the Muslim world in reaction to an inflammatory fringe cartoon in a Danish newspaper or a marginal American homemade movie. Meanwhile, in conflict situations, social networking may serve as a platform to reinforce traditional social fissures as much as it dispels them. The widespread sharing of videotaped atrocities in the Syrian civil war appears to have done more to harden the resolve of the warring parties than to stop the killing, while the notorious ISIL has used social media to declare a caliphate and exhort holy war. Some authoritarian structures may fall as a result of information spread online or protests convened via social networking; they may in time be replaced by more open and participatory systems elaborating humane and inclusive values. Elsewhere other authorities will gain exponentially more powerful means of repression. The proliferation of ubiquitous sensors tracking and analyzing individuals, recording and transmitting their every experience (in some cases now, essentially from birth), and (at the forefront of computing) anticipating their thoughts opens up repressive as well as liberating possibilities. In this respect, among the new technology’s most radical aspects may be the power it vests in small groups, at the pinnacle of political and economic structures, to process and monitor information, shape debate, and to some extent define truth. The West lauded the “Facebook” and “Twitter” aspects of the Arab Spring revolutions. Yet where the digitally equipped crowd succeeds in its initial demonstrations, the use of new technology does not guarantee that the values that prevail will be those of the devices’ inventors, or even those of the majority of the crowd. Moreover, the same technologies used to convene demonstrations can also be used to track and suppress them. Today most public squares in any major city are subject to constant video surveillance, and any smartphone owner can be tracked electronically in real time. As one recent survey concluded, “The Internet has made tracking easier, cheaper, and more useful.” The global scope and speed of communication erode the distinction between domestic and international upheavals, and between leaders and the immediate demands of the most vocal groups. Events whose effects once would have taken months to unfold ricochet globally within seconds. Policymakers are expected to have formulated a position within several hours and to interject it into the course of events—where its effects will be broadcast globally by the same instantaneous networks. The temptation to cater to the demands of the digitally reflected multitude may override the judgment required to chart a complex course in harmony with long-term purposes. The distinction between information, knowledge, and wisdom is weakened. The new diplomacy asserts that if a sufficiently large number of people gather to publicly call for the resignation of a government and broadcast their demands digitally, they constitute a democratic expression obliging Western moral and even material support. This approach calls on Western leaders (and particularly American ones) to communicate their endorsement immediately and in unambiguous terms by the same social-networking methods so that their rejection of the government will be rebroadcast on the Internet and achieve further promulgation and affirmation. If the old diplomacy sometimes failed to extend support to morally deserving political forces, the new diplomacy risks indiscriminate intervention disconnected from strategy. It declares moral absolutes to a global audience before it has become possible to assess the long-term intentions of the central actors, their prospects for success, or the ability to carry out a long-term policy. The motives of the principal groups, their capacity for concerted leadership, the underlying strategic and political factors in the country, and their relation to other strategic priorities are treated as secondary to the overriding imperative of endorsing a mood of the moment. Order should not have priority over freedom. But the affirmation of freedom should be elevated from a mood to a strategy. In the quest for humane values, the expression of elevated principles is a first step; they must then be carried through the inherent ambiguities and contradictions of all human affairs, which is the task of policy. In this process, the sharing of information and the public support of free institutions are important new aspects of our era. On their own, absent attention to underlying strategic and political factors, they will have difficulty fulfilling their promise. Great statesmen, however different as personalities, almost invariably had an instinctive feeling for the history of their societies. As Edmund Burke wrote, “People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.” What will be the attitudes of those who aspire to be great statesmen in the Internet age? A combination of chronic insecurity and insistent self-assertion threatens both leaders and the public in the Internet age. Leaders, because they are less and less the originators of their programs, seek to dominate by willpower or charisma. The general public’s access to the intangibles of the public debate is ever more constrained. Major pieces of legislation in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere often contain thousands of pages of text whose precise meaning is elusive even to those legislators who voted for them. Previous generations of Western leaders performed their democratic role while recognizing that leadership did not consist of simply executing the results of public polls on a day-to-day basis. Tomorrow’s generations may prove reluctant to exercise leadership independent of data-mining techniques—even as their mastery of the information environment may reward them with reelection for pursuing cleverly targeted, short-term policies. In such an environment, the participants in the public debate risk being driven less by reasoned arguments than by what catches the mood of the moment. The immediate focus is pounded daily into the public consciousness by advocates whose status is generated by the ability to dramatize. Participants at public demonstrations are rarely assembled around a specific program. Rather, many seek the uplift of a moment of exaltation, treating their role in the event primarily as participation in an emotional experience. These attitudes reflect in part the complexity of defining an identity in the age of social media. Hailed as a breakthrough in human relations, social media encourage the sharing of the maximum amount of information, personal or political. People are encouraged—and solicited—to post their most intimate acts and thoughts on public websites run by companies whose internal policies are, even when public, largely incomprehensible to the ordinary user. The most sensitive of this information is to be made available only to “friends” who, in practice, can run into the thousands. Approbation is the goal; were it not the objective, the sharing of personal information would not be so widespread and sometimes so jarring. Only very strong personalities are able to resist the digitally aggregated and magnified unfavorable judgments of their peers. The quest is for consensus, less by the exchange of ideas than by a sharing of emotions. Nor can participants fail to be affected by the exaltation of fulfillment by membership in a crowd of ostensibly like-minded people. And are these networks going to be the first institutions in human history liberated from occasional abuse and therefore relieved of the traditional checks and balances? Side by side with the limitless possibilities opened up by the new technologies, reflection about international order must include the internal dangers of societies driven by mass consensus, deprived of the context and foresight needed on terms compatible with their historical character. In every other era, this has been considered the essence of leadership; in our own, it risks being reduced to a series of slogans designed to capture immediate short-term approbation. Foreign policy is in danger of turning into a subdivision of domestic politics instead of an exercise in shaping the future. If the major countries conduct their policies in this manner internally, their relations on the international stage will suffer concomitant distortions. The search for perspective may well be replaced by a hardening of differences, statesmanship by posturing. As diplomacy is transformed into gestures geared toward passions, the search for equilibrium risks giving way to a testing of limits. Wisdom and foresight will be needed to avoid these hazards and ensure that the technological era fulfills its vast promise. It needs to deepen its preoccupation with the immediate through a better understanding of history and geography. That task is not only—or even primarily—an issue for technology. Society needs to adapt its education policy to ultimate imperatives in the long-term direction of the country and in the cultivation of its values. The inventors of the devices that have so revolutionized the collection and sharing of information can make an equal if not greater contribution by devising means to deepen its conceptual foundation. On the way to the first truly global world order, the great human achievements of technology must be fused with enhanced powers of humane, transcendent, and moral judgment.