Speculative Essay on Future Power Networks and ‘Hard Gatekeeping’ Between the US and China

traditional thinking. Co-evolution exists as a real possibility for the two nations but so too does co-extinction, a problem of mis-designed complex systems that can rattle themselves apart. This is precisely what a confident Hard Gatekeeping strategy can avoid. When we speak of the possibiltity of a new type of great power relations it is because so much of future power will be decided on a topological landscapes, on that nearly living surface that is marked by such different rules than the older, industrial power maps. It takes a network to fight a network, as we’ve said. Networks confront us, constantly now, with the unexpected. No one forming the IMF in 1949 considered digital currency. No one developing arms protocols in the 1990s thought about cyber weapons. Artificially intelligent weapons, migrant waves, income fractures - these and other emerging puzzles were never contemplated in our existing international arrangements. Collectively attacking these challenges is not merely more efficient; it is our only option. Yes, it’s easy enough to picture the US and China battling each other over islands and protocols and technology structures in the decades to come. Certainly this possibility has to be prepared for. But this is to regard the world in industrial terms. Ask yourself: What, really is the point of power? It is to secure stability, not to tip the world to chaos just because we think we might be better off on the other side. The networks tell us what they want. They want gates. Our only question - and it is the same question that lingers in Beijing and Washington - is: Are we smart enough to listen? 5. How will power distribute itself in the future? Just what will the network of nations and datawebs and insurgents finally look like when it settles into some predictable if still roiling order ten or a hundred years hence? Will it be made up of different walled and gated systems, linked at certain moments, unplugged at others? Or might it collect with that “winner take all” logic we've seen firing along the most efficient networks? Most traditional foreign policy looks at history and sees the constant, violent rocking of a “balance of power”. Nations thirst for security, they vie with one another for influence, resources, and control. France rises. Statesmen in Berlin, Vienna and London conspire to knock her down. This is the order that dominated Europe for much of the last 500 years. But history is also filled with enduring, stable arrangements - moments where the balance settles a bit and a single power dominates. Asia, Europe, the Middle East, South America - each produced nations that stretched mastery the system for generations, for centuries even. If you map the rise and fall of nations and empires over the past 4,000 years - as the political scientists Stuart Kauffman, Richard Little and William Wohlforth once attempted in an heroic statistical effort - about half of human history has been marked by this sort of hegemonic stability. China led East Asia’s order from 1300 to 1900, for instance. The Japanese and Koreans and Vietnamese all found it was wiser to play by China’s rules than to attack her. Assyrian imperial arrangements overmastered a dozen smaller states from the 9 to 7 centuries BCE. The Dehli Sultinate managed hegemony in South Asia from 12 to 14 centuries. The Mughals owned nearly two 185 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018417