War is slipping out of the exclusive grasp of the state and into the hands of transnational and subnational actors, “global guerillas” and even superempowered individuals waging a ” Fourth Generation War”. In 1939, to shatter the established order, Adolf Hitler had to first hijack the state of a great power and then systematically turn a nation into a mighty weapon. Today, the Fuhrer could accomplish widespread ruin with fewer followers than marched with him in the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch. An interconnected global system, one that did not exist during the 1930’s, is vulnerable to system perturbations that allow the effects of catastrophic attacks on critical nodes to cascade across the planet.

Taking down a region’s financial system may cause more quantifiable damage than the Wehrmacht’s blitzkrieg and it might be accomplished from a lap-top in a cheap motel room. Counterattacks by the state may now cause more “blowback” than the state can now tolerate. Like Moses we can see the Promised Land even as we dance on the precipice of the Abyss.

That centrifugal diffusion of war powers calls into question whether globalization and the increasing diffusion of liberal, democratic norms as the only legitimate political system will bring RJ Rummel’s ” Democratic Peace” or a situation where state actors are at peace with one another but are struggling ineffectively to contain the forces of disruption and terror in revolt against modernity. Will Dr. Barnett’s Core powers unite to reset the rules to better squelch violent nihilist “warrior” groups that move through the Gap like Mao’s guerillas once did through the Chinese people ? Right now America is not leveraging its advantages in the War on Terror, not even, as Austin Bay pointed out, in the sphere of information and media, a field we pioneered. Our enormous reserves of ” softpower” go untapped or are being turned against us.

What American and Core leaders need to do is to begin thinking in terms of the systemic whole because it is the field upon which all their actions play out. The consequences of decentralization of power and information brought by connectivity to previously disconnected communities will, as pointed out by Doug Macdonald’s Thai example, incite local elites to resistance to defend their often unjustfiable traditional prerogatives. These are forseeable outcomes and more importantly, they are mostly avoidable ones.

The sooner that our leaders understand that they march upon a spider’s web, the better.

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