I couldn't turn away from global strategist John Robb's latest piece for World Politics Review when he kicked it off with my favorite diplomat, George Kennan. (And don't tell me normal people don't have "favorite diplomats".) Robb offers a send-up to Kennan that uses Kennan's ephemeral 1947 telegram that essentially shaped a half-century of U.S. foreign policy as a filter through which to examine the 21st century.
The new enemy? Global economics.
In a nutshell, Robb argues that our new global economic system is overconnected and "dynamically unstable"; that nation-states are becoming irrelevant; and that new emerging groups will prove to be more agile and disruptive than we can imagine. It's a glum assessment, and Robb argues that we've hit the point of no return:
It's unlikely that we will see any reversal in the spread of the global supernetwork. To the contrary, it will continue to expand, complexify, and intensify. As a result, the nation-state as an organizational system will continue to weaken, shocks and disruptions will occur more often, and super-empowered oppositional groups/networks will organically proliferate. In sum, the only policy solution that could possibly work is one that attempts to limit the spread of chaos at the lowest possible cost.
Bleak, no? His solutions are not as depressing, but they seem unlikely to rise to the surface absent some additional economic and structural pain.
