The End of Power (24 page)

The possibility of war on the electronic frontier is a particular concern. A record of attacks in the last decade has set out the wide scope of the threat that nations face—for instance, attacks on systems to immobilize them or plant malicious agents, attacks on information networks to collect sensitive data or prevent communications, and attacks on key infrastructure such as power grids.
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Cyber-warfare also includes “message war” actions such as distributing propaganda and redirecting websites. Various forms of cyber-attack have been reported against systems in the United States, Iran, Georgia, Estonia, Kyrgyzstan, Azerbaijan, and else-where.
Privately owned services like Twitter and Google Mail have also been attacked—for instance, during the unrest in Iran in summer 2009. But cyber-war has yet to experience its analog to, say, 9/11—an event so massive in scale, damage, and visibility as to focus resources and galvanize public support. The evidence suggests that governments have been slow to adjust to cyberspace as a battlespace, and it is clear that hackers and cyber-attackers still enjoy a wide berth in terms of the opportunities they have to disrupt critical governmental functions. And time is of the essence: “Staying ahead of the game is important in light of the dizzying change of pace in the cyber world,” argued Amos Yadlin, the Israeli military intelligence chief: “at most, a few months in response to a change, compared to the years that pilots had.”
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The delay in making the adjustments needed to survive on the new, scattered landscape of war is not necessarily the fault of military minds, Arquilla, the military scholar, points out. “Awareness of these issues has been slowly but steadily growing over the past two decades,” Arquilla wrote in 2010. “But senior commanders will tend to fall back on a fatalism driven by their belief that both Congressional and industrial leaders will thwart any effort at radical change.”
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Moreover, it is not as if the arguments for traditional military buildup with advanced technology and superior firepower have vanished. The scholar Joe Nye, who coined the concept of “soft power,” argued that military power “still structures expectations and shapes political calculations.” Even when a conventional military is not deployed in active conflict, its deterrence role remains important. “Military force, along with norms and institutions, helps to provide a minimal degree of order,” Nye wrote.
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But if brute military force is no longer enough to ensure dominance, the question then becomes one of how resources are allocated among traditional vectors of power and their new, relatively untried alternatives. No one thinks terrorists can stop great powers from existing, but surely they can affect their behavior and deny them options that they used to take for granted.

Who, in fact, are the Zetas? On one level, they're just one of the many armed parties involved in Mexico's long-running drug war. This war is no metaphor: from December 2006 to early 2012, almost fifty thousand people died in drug-related violence.
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The conflict has subtracted huge realms of both physical territory and economic activity from the authority of the
Mexican government. In this picture, the Zetas are especially powerful. They control key territory in northeast Mexico and watch over the bulk of drug shipments into the United States through the busy Laredo crossing. A militia of an estimated four thousand people, they are notorious for a reign of terror over the areas where they operate, and for their reach elsewhere in Mexico and across the US border. Among the many opponents Mexico faces in this battle, the Zetas may be the most daunting. But what sets them apart is their origins. The Zetas were recruited from Mexico's elite national military and police units to become the private army for the Gulf Cartel. Corruption and defection are common in Mexico, but the Zetas elevated it to a new scale. Now the Zetas are undergoing a further transformation. As the power struggle among rival cartels shakes out, the Zetas, once a militia of enforcers, have become a narco-trafficking organization of their own, battling for key markets and distribution routes and reportedly expanding into Europe through a tie-up with the Calabrian 'Ndrangheta.

The shift of the Zetas from government soldiers to private soldiers to traffickers illustrates the interchangeable nature of roles in conflict today. It has echoes in the rise of kidnapping as a business among Iraqi insurgents, themselves often veterans of Saddam Hussein's army; in the intermingling of the Taliban with the Afghan drug trade; in the rise of piracy. These examples illustrate how economic opportunity—from better pay to the windfalls of criminal enterprise—drives participants in conflict. Money has always been one motivation to take up arms (and sometimes to put them down); but in an environment of decentralized conflict where the most useful tools are ones that are easily obtained, economic incentives are especially strong and the merits of obeying a command-and-control structure are correspondingly weak. From crime to insurgency to private military firms, market opportunities abound for people with relevant training in weapons and logistics, which themselves involve more and more traditionally “civilian” technology.

In other words,
orders
carry less weight in conflict today than
material incentives.
In the traditional military, the level of pay is secondary; the primary motive for participation is loyalty, citizenship, a sense of mission or purpose—a phenomenon illustrated in striking fashion by military enrollments in the United States after 9/11. That sense of calling extends to some insurgencies—and to violent organizations as well, of course—that lure recruits with appeals to defend a land against occupiers or a faith against infidels. But the dispersal of military roles and the rise of nonmilitary ways to participate in conflict mean that the signals of the market—
prices, payments, opportunity costs—now shape patterns of violence to a degree not experienced in the modern West in at least a century.

The centrifugal force that has scattered conflict, unpacked military capabilities, and transported these capabilities into a hybrid military/civilian realm has not limited its impact to large national armies. Even new players in conflict are at risk of falling prey to the same dispersal that has facilitated their own rise.

For examples, look no further than the jihadi movement. The 9/11 attack and the ones that followed in Madrid and London were the result of long months, even years, of planning and the effort of a network with a core leadership in the persons of Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri. More recent attacks traced to Al Qaeda have been smaller and—once thwarted—almost comical considering the personalities of the would-be “shoe” and “underwear” bombers. Why the difference? One reason may be the improved capability of counterterrorism agencies to disrupt large plots before they reach fruition. But another has to do with the effects on the jihadi world, and on Al Qaeda itself, of the decay of its power and capabilities. Studying the “cracks in the jihad,” scholar Thomas Rid has examined the different niches that jihadis occupy. Local insurgencies fighting for terrain are typically not interested in global reach. Some jihadi insurgents have turned the corner into organized crime and trafficking, motivated by money over mission, not unlike the Zetas. Still more jihadis come from a Web-enabled diaspora in Europe, North America, and elsewhere. Some of these have found their way into full-fledged military operations; a case in point is Alabama-raised Omar Shafik Hammami, who went from popular high school student in middle America to major guerrilla leader in Somalia.
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The disparity of interests, senses of mission, and capabilities makes the jihadi world as fragile from within as it has looked menacing from without, argue Rid and his colleague Marc Hecker. The same internal fragility exists among the Taliban, whom military observers have separated into “big-T” ideologically-driven fighters and “small-t” members who are driven more by parochial concerns and monetary gain. A study of forty-five terrorist groups that ended their activities found that only a minority were actually defeated; twenty-six of the forty-five dissolved under the effect of internal strife. The franchise model that is attributed to Al Qaeda
is misleading, Rid and Hecker further argue; it suggests a degree of command and coordination that overstates the reality. They suggest that “wikiterrorism”—loose and fragile transmission of ideology, methods, and allegiances—better describes the way jihadism propagates, making it at once more ubiquitous and less effective.
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DRONES, IEDS, A FULLY WEAPONIZED CYBERSPACE, PRECISION-GUIDED
munitions, suicide bombers, pirates, wealthy and well-armed transnational criminal networks, and a host of other armed players have already altered the international security landscape. The future shape of this new landscape is ever changing and therefore impossible to map accurately. But there is one assumption that can safely be made: the power of large military establishments will be less than what it was in the past.

ON MARCH 28, 2012, AN EVENT TOOK PLACE THAT WAS AS IMPORTANT
as it was unnoticed. According to the calculations of Australia's Treasury, that day the collective size of the less developed economies surpassed those of the rich world. That day brought to a close what columnist Peter Hartcher described as “an aberration that lasted one and a half centuries . . . [as] China was the biggest economy in the world until 1840.” He went on to quote Ken Courtis, a well-known observer of Asian economies: “The Chinese look at this and they say, ‘We just had a couple of bad centuries. . . . In the blink of a generation, global power has shifted. Over time, this will not just be an economic and financial shift but a political, cultural and ideological one.”
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Will it? The readers' comments to Hartcher's column offered a revealing synthesis of a debate that is consuming scholars and policymakers everywhere: Which countries will call the shots in the years ahead? Derek from Canberra wrote: “I don't think we've got much to worry about for several more decades. On paper China and India are power-houses, but most of their citizens don't even have access to sewerage or electricity.” “Barfiller” added: “Let's not forget other ‘emerging economy' considerations: border conflicts; water and resources rights; patents and other intellectual property; ethnic, religious and ideological differences; cultural diversity; historical arguments and wars; etc, etc. It won't be all sweetness and light for the newly developed nations.” David from Vermont noted that it was necessary
to take into account “the distribution of wealth within the populations of these countries. The difference between the ‘wealth' of the average Chinese and their privileged comrades in the party is, in my opinion, an un-fillable gap (as per India).” “Caledonia,” who wrote from Sydney, is more worried: “Well, if China's economy comes crashing down you will find yourself in an unemployment queue and feel lucky if you can get a job as toilet cleaner. If China sneezes Australia will catch a cold. If China gets a cold Australia ends up with pneumonia.”
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Implicit in these comments are fundamental assumptions about what makes a nation powerful, powerful enough to make it a
hegemon
—a nation with the capacity to impose its will on others. And as this chapter will show, not only have the factors that define a hegemon changed but the acquisition and use of power in the international system are also undergoing a profound transformation.

For centuries, the job of tending the rivalry between nations and scrabbling for territory, resources, and influence has been the noble calling of generals and ambassadors. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the representatives of the so-called Great Powers wielded their respective country's military might and economic clout to win wars, harness alliances, secure trade routes and territory, and set the rules for the rest of the world. After World War II even more impressive creatures, the superpowers, came to perch on top of this group. And the dawn of the twenty-first century, with the Soviet Union consigned to the history books, found just one player paramount: the sole superpower, the hegemon, the United States. For the first time in history, many argued, the struggle for power among nations had produced one single, clear, and maybe even final winner.

Consider the evidence from WikiLeaks, which released a trove of more than 250,000 US diplomatic cables that, as the organization's leader Julian Assange luridly put it, “show the extent of U.S. spying on its allies and the UN; turning a blind eye to corruption and human rights abuse in ‘client states'; backroom deals with supposedly neutral countries; lobbying for U.S. corporations; and the measures U.S. diplomats take to advance those who have access to them.”
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The reaction of experienced analysts such as Jessica Mathews, the president of the Carnegie Endowment in Washington, is that this is not a surprise: “This is precisely what hegemony has always been. This is how dominant nations actually behave,” she wryly noted.
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What many of these cables also show is a hegemon struggling to get things done, stymied by other countries' bureaucracies, politicians, non
governmental organizations, and ordinary citizens. Dip into the cables for any one particular month and you would see: