What goes around, does it come around?
■"At America's Malls, Grim Preparations For the Unthinkable: Spurred by 9/11 and London, Guards Adopt Israeli Tactics to Stop Suicide Bombers," by Robert Block, Wall Street Journal, 8 August 2005, p. A1.■"War Plans Drafted To Counter Terror Attacks in U.S.: Domestic Effort Is Big Shift for Military," by Bradley Graham, Washington Post, 8 August 2005, p. A1.
■"Battling Avian Flu's Spread: Migrations Could Play a Role, But Effort to Track Wild Birds By Tagging Them Isn't Easy," by Nicholas Zamiska, Wall Street Journal, 8 August 2005, p. B1.
■"NATO's Peacekeeping Problem: Restrictions Hinder Allied Operations in Kosovo and Afghanistan," by Philip Shishkin, Wall Street Journal, 8 August 2005, p. A9.
■"Africa and Its Rapacious Leaders," book review by Janet Maslin, New York Times, 8 August 2005, p. B6.
■"The Next Chinese Threat," op-ed by Sebastian Mallaby, Washington Post, 8 August 2005, p. A15.
This series triggered a lot of associations-meaning horizontal linkages-for me.
America's getting jacked for suicide bombers at the malls, because if it can happen to the UK, which looks so much like us, it can happen here.
Except the Brits are less like us than you'd think, as are their Muslims. The Brits, to their credit, are awfully resilient when it comes to such terror, and as such, tend not to overreact in the ways that we tend to politically. We can do that with less fear in our system because we have a Bill of Rights that keeps us all individually more safe from such excesses than in Britain. Some view such a focus on individual rights as our "weakness," when in reality it's our greatest strength: we can go hard core with really very little risk to the republic, because, through our courts, we're self-healing.
Our military is right: if something really bad happened here in the States, the Defense Department would take the lead in the opening days of the response, but that role would be very short-lived. The Pentagon, like most of Washington, tends to entertain too many fantasies about how average citizens will freak out and tear the place apart in response to catastrophic terrorism, when our history is to respond with great aplomb, fantastic courage, and a willingness to stick with the problem until solutions win out. Frankly, we all tend to vastly underestimate the resiliency of this country, especially how the private sector ultimately provides the great bulk of that resiliency.
In the long aftermath of 9/11, our robustness will not come from Northern Command plans for near martial law in response to terrorism, but in the private sector's amazing ability to turn danger and fear into new products and industries that make us all safer while rendering our economic activities all the safer. It will be in that sense of growing safety that Americans will increasingly warm to the tasks and the moral imperatives of shrinking the Gap, because, in reality, it's mostly fear about what such an effort will do to us (not them) that holds us back.
It's not terror in the States that should drive this process, but our growing awareness that it's the sheer connectivity with the rest of the world that poses the inherent risks-not out of malice per se. Ask yourself, what is more likely to kill millions in coming years: Al Qaeda or something like avian flu.
But here's how it all comes together: Americans, freaking over terrorists attacking our food and water systems, build a more robust system. That growing robustness makes us more confident in our growing connectivity abroad on these issues. That growing connectivity spreads our more robust rule sets to more Gap-like areas, raising their practices. Meanwhile, we're all safer against terrorism. So yeah, security fears lead, but in the end, it's not the "Manhattan Project" or the "Marshall Plan"-like efforts of the government that's decisive, it's the private sector that simply marketizes that fear and turns it into a series of new products and services that keep us all safer and allow us to maintain our standard of living while spreading such benefits to a wider pool of humanity.
When government should take the lead is where it logically makes sense for us to lead: bringing security to the Gap through peacekeeping. Sure, let's have more cooperation between NORTHCOM and local cops in the U.S., but that goal pales before getting better SysAdmin cooperation between Core nations in Gap peacekeeping efforts. The political suffering of the Middle East takes most of our attention today, because 9/11 linked it so profoundly to our own sense of vulnerability in a connected world, but beyond the Middle East there are far bigger jobs that await in Africa, which, in an increasingly globalized world, will increasingly demand our attention because of its ability to export its pain and suffering (AIDS being just a preview of what will increasingly happen unless we do more to connect Africa to the Core in far better ways than today).
Sebastian Mallaby, a really brilliant thinker, makes a point that dovetails nicely with my emerging theory that it will be the "Chinese threat" in Africa that pulls us there militarily (lest they "influence" too much!): we stopped for now, through our resistance to China's bid to buy UNOCAL, the private-sector route for Beijing to meet its burgeoning energy needs (buying Old Core energy companies), and so we've forced them-inadvertently-down the more public-sector path of getting into bed with corrupt regimes in places like Africa. This will do bad things for human rights groups working with corporations to force better economic relationships on raw materials in the Gap, and that will likely worsen political and security situations there.
My point: trust the private sector to do what it does well (marketize routine SysAdmin stuff in the Core) and push the government to do what only it can (true Leviathan work and the tougher, more labor-intensive SysAdmin work in the Gap). This is just another way of describing the military-market nexus: the military helps the rules emerge, but it's the private sector that truly locks them in and maintains them over time. Democracy is self-policing and self-healing, and democracies go hand in hand with markets.