Generic essay on American foreign policy and network theory

fracturing of ancient China during the Spring and Autumn era or in the Roman Empire in the age of the Caesars. Our current shifting — that tap, tap on every nation’s politics, media, and economics - isn’t really so unpredictable after all. 242 You may know the old saw of military parade evaluation: That the more magnificent a nation’s uniforms are the weaker it’s army usually is. But the gold-braided admirals of some three-ship navy reflect a very human need for security, and particularly for a self-decided feeling of security. Every nation has it’s own foreign affairs aims. Each cherishes a certain national image, memories of military glory and of “interests” inseparable from culture or identity. The goals of the French and the Turks, for instance, each evoke an encyclopedia of history, tradition and politics. Uneasiness in Paris about capitalism and immigration, for instance; or Anrka’s worry about ethnic division, fundamentalisms, and the creeping nuclear progress of their neighbors. Our era’s revolutionary logic will shape choices in every nation differently. But I'd like here to discuss American foreign policy. America plays a central role in world order now. The country’s leading position makes her, to some degree, an unavoidable gatekeeper. In the Napoleonic era, nearly every revolution or war could be tied to energies emanating from Paris. During the Cold War most puzzles of politics or geography might be framed in terms of a zero-sum competition with the USSR. In our own age, we'll find most every problem links to networks and their new logic. And - for now at least - to America. Thomas Paine’s memorable 250 year-old assessment, that “The cause of America is the cause of all mankind,” touches this linked universalism in a way he never could have imagined. “Betweeness” or “Centrality” are the way network science labels and measures such a role. Just how essential is a certain nation or trading platform or point? The networks of America won't, in the future, be the only networks. They will be less “between”. But they will be, always and indelibly, the first reference for design. If the traditional aim of American foreign policy was to prevent the emergence of a challenger that threatened the country directly, or that might fence off and manipulate Asia or Europe or Latin America against Washington’s aims, the concern now is different: Mastery of topological destiny. There are those who observe, as an American think tank noted in 2015, “Today the United States faces no existential threat.”243 This is wrong. The emergence and shape of networks is just such a danger. Security, the great foreign policy theorist Andre Wolfers once wrote, is “the absence of threats to acquired values.”244 The networks around us, as we've seen, are demolishing older values. Often because we want them to. Any revolutionary technology unbuttons an older order this way. But we now approach this destabilized world with a sort of wideyed panic. Control terrorism, manage climate 242 Our current shifting: See also Lars-Erik Cederman, T. Camber Warren, and Didier Sornette, “Testing Clausewitz: Nationalism, Mass Mobilization, and the Severity of War” International Organization 65, Fall 2011, pp 605-38 243 “America faces no existential threat”: See James Dobbins, et al. Choices for America in a Turbulent World (Santa Monica: RAND Corporation, 2015) xiv 244 In his classic essay: Andre Wolfers, “National Security’ as an ambigious symbol”, Political Science Quarterly, 67 (1952) 485 170 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018402