Credit:http://foreignpolicy.com
- Trump’s election is the latest and most dramatic manifestation of a moment of staggering global transformation and volatility.
The diffusion and fragmentation of power, capital, and politics are fueling profound forces that are shaking the underpinnings of international order: the return of great power rivalry and the rise of conflict after many years of decline; the emergence of new powers; the shift of economic dynamism from West to East and destabilizing economic stagnation and dislocation; and the rejection by societies in many regions of globalization and the embrace of an angry, fortress-like nationalism.
- Technology — broadly speaking, the internet, mobile platforms, social media, and computing power — is among the most powerful of these forces, for good and ill.
Technological innovation has contributed to the most significant period of economic growth and poverty alleviation in modern history, increased life expectancies, expanded productivity, ushered in a new era of clean energy, and reshaped global communications and commerce.
- In half a century, the world has gone from zero digital wireless devices to more than 4 billion, and one-third of the world’s population is now on the internet.
An additional 2 billion to 3 billion people will come online in the next three years, marking what will be the fastest period of internet adoption in history.
- While the internet has become a critical lifeblood for economies and societies, this also makes it an increasingly contested and volatile global commons.
Advanced economies lose billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of jobs a year as a result of malicious cyberactivity, while nearly half of all internet users around the world are chained by government restrictions on internet content, access, and communication.
- Malign forces prey on the vulnerability of technologically dependent and interconnected societies, recruiting foot soldiers, targeting critical infrastructure, and meddling in politics.
We’ve entered a new era, and we lack the shared vocabulary and political doctrines to make sense of it.
- The question facing the Trump administration — and its counterparts around the world — is how to adapt traditional concepts and tools of statecraft to the digital age.
We’ve entered a new era, and we lack the shared vocabulary and political doctrines to make sense of it. Perhaps more importantly, the generation of leaders who can seamlessly integrate policies in the physical and digital worlds is still emerging.
- Meeting this challenge requires doing away with the habit of separating — analytically, organizationally, and strategically — the physical and digital domains of international politics.
The temptation to separate these dimensions is driven in part by the lack of technological expertise among the foreign-policy community and the prevailing idea that technology companies have a limited or nonexistent role to play in diplomacy.
- The post-Snowden environment has exacerbated this by seeding mistrust between the two communities and eroding previously held mutual respect for each other’s expertise.
During our years in government, we witnessed the negative effects of this dynamic firsthand.
- But we also saw this compelling shift, in large part because both communities recognize that there is an opportunity and a mutual benefit to shaping the doctrines, norms, rules, and institutions that can protect our interests and values in cyberspace.
Both communities appreciate the central role that governments play when it comes to rule-making in the cyberdomain, and both understand that for these rules to be effective and equitable, they have to apply internationally.
Staff members sit at their work stations at the National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center in Arlington, Va.(Photo credit: SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images)
- This reality is precisely why diplomacy still matters. And it’s precisely why it must evolve.
This is not a simple exercise, and we don’t pretend to have identified all the right questions, let alone the right answers.
- We cannot predict the direction and pace of innovation, nor how actors will adjust and respond.
Nevertheless, we think it’s useful to begin by examining four core components of statecraft — power, coercive diplomacy, alliances, and foreign assistance.
1. Power: How critical is cybercapacity for getting one’s way in the world?
- Cybercapacity is an aggregate of a number of factors, from the quality and strength of a country’s digital infrastructure (access to electricity, internet quality, and internet penetration) to its innovation environment (ease of founding start-ups, access to venture capital funding, and population of talented engineers), political space (governed by laws on freedom of expression), and soft power (how much other actors desire products of its technology industry).
Cybercapacity has served as a force multiplier for rising powers like China while their traditional military hardware lags behind.
- Cybercapacity has served as a force multiplier for rising powers like China while their traditional military hardware lags behind.
At the same time, investments in cybercapacity have allowed declining states, like Russia, to remain heavy hitters, while giving a diverse range of smaller states — like Israel, Singapore, Estonia, and Iran — an opportunity to enhance their geopolitical potential.
- While cybervariables affect national power, they do not define it.
Pakistan’s development of nuclear capacity 30 years ago gave it significant leverage, but did not catapult it to the table of great powers or allow it to behave as it pleased on the international stage.
- The same dynamic will likely hold for cybercapable states.
However, when it comes to non-state actors, cybercapacity may prove more significant.
- Building cybercapacity doesn’t require natural resources, nor does it require the enormous capital investments that nuclear states had to make.
As a result, non-state actors face minimal barriers to entering cyberspace, wielding political influence, or carrying out significant cyberoperations independent of, or on behalf of, states.
- Furthermore, states’ reliance on sophisticated digital networks, which invariably contain vulnerabilities, gives non-state actors a disproportionate advantage.
In the ~near~ future, a more sophisticated terrorist groups would likely adopt many of the tactics, but might manage to go a step further and develop, or otherwise acquire, cyberattack capabilities.
- These capabilities could set the stage for a catastrophe — imagine a cyberattack that brought down the Manhattan electric grid coordinated with physical attacks on multiple targets.
We must prepare for these sorts of scenarios.
- While the Islamic State conducts most of its operations in the physical realm, hacking networks like Anonymous rely predominantly on digital capabilities.
Despite Anonymous having little, if any, centralized command structure, the group (or individuals claiming to be affiliated with the group) has successfully attacked government agencies, major international corporations, and political figures.
- Anonymous and the Islamic State both demonstrate a central feature of the digital age: Even decentralized non-state actors can wield considerable power through the acquisition and deployment of cybercapacity. We should expect this trend to intensify quickly.
2. Coercive diplomacy: To what extent are traditional concepts of deterrence and leverage relevant in the digital age?
Theorists and policymakers have developed views about the key ingredients for successful deterrence (making clear and credible threats that persuade a country not to take a specific action) and the even more challenging task of compellence (exacting costs to force a country to change its behavior) in the physical realm.
- But recent cyberattacks like North Korea’s hack of Sony Pictures, China’s stealing of 18 million security clearance records from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, and Russia’s brazen interference in the U.S. presidential election have called into question whether those views apply to actions taken in cyberspace.
Deterrence and compellence in cyberspace are complicated by a number of factors — the near absence of advance warning, the challenges of attribution, the uncertainty about the immediate as well as second- and third-order consequences of any action, the nonexistence of doctrines of proportional response, the dearth of communication hotlines for cybercrises, the paucity of legal precedent, and the lack of established credibility and technical capability regarding retaliation.
- Because the scale and nature of the challenge are still unclear, it’s critical that we move quickly to create avenues for communication between cybercapable states to identify areas of mutual self-restraint, minimize miscommunication, and manage crises.
We also need to develop and test doctrines of cyberdeterrence and compellence now — just as we didn’t wait for nuclear Armageddon to develop new doctrines during the Cold War.
- We need to take a close look at our use of sanctions, an increasingly important tool in our coercive diplomacy toolkit, and have been a key element of our responses to cyberattacks from Pyongyang to Moscow.
As we further refine the scale and scope of sanctions for cyberactivity, we must heed former Secretary of the Treasury Jack Lew’s warning of the risks of overreliance on sanctions and of forgetting their purpose: building leverage to change state behavior — not long-term harm.
- In the absence of satisfying policy options, we risk deploying sanctions that bark more than they bite, undermine the desired deterrent effect, disadvantage U.S. companies, unnecessarily anger our partners, and expose our economy to retribution.
Beyond using sanctions to punish offensive cyberoperations, we should consider expanding their use to support human rights.
- One way to do so is by punishing companies and states that provide repressive regimes potentially harmful technology, such as spyware, censorship tools, and surveillance systems.
This is a worthy, if complicated, endeavor, since some of these tools can be put to legitimate use.
- The reverse approach — making available virtual private networks, secure browsers, and operating systems hardened against surveillance to peaceful activist groups — is equally tricky.
The relatively easy part of the challenge is incentivizing private companies to build more of these tools and disseminate them in the right places.
- This requires enhanced cooperation between the American government and the tech industry.
In some cases, like during the 2009 Green Movement in Iran, it requires removing legal restrictions that prevent companies from making their products available in countries under sanctions.
- The much more difficult challenge is ensuring that newly opened space for discourse doesn’t open up space for violent extremists.