From Competition to Conflict
Photo Credit: Ryan Lazarus
The global economy is theories of interactions occurring in a seemingly chaotic environment. In reality, these interactions take place across multiple jurisdictions, so transactions require coordination across multiple domestic political environments. Sometimes, these transactions involve the private sector and the government. Yet, the engagement is framed by perceptions of nations and the behavior of individuals.
Sitting on top of the global economy are structures that bring some mechanisms for state coordination and introduce governance into the chaotic, anarchy.
The anarchic nature of the international system is truly fascinating. States have claims to sovereignty and backing by international law that states are sovereign entities that should completely control their domestic environment. As the world becomes more globalized, the domestic actors will cede some control to foreign actors. Especially in times where foreign direct investment is involved.
Think of the New York Stock Exchange, pictured above. It is situated on Wall Street in Manhattan. The New York Stock Exchange is the largest public equity market in the world, with a market capitalization totaling more than $30 trillion. Now, look at this video.
Video Credit: Ryan Lazarus
There is a Tesla Cybertruck sitting outside. What is the first thing you think of when you think of a Tesla Cybertruck?
For me, it’s confusion about what’s inside of the vehicle. Fear for my life. Concern that American institutions are threatened by political dissenters and terrorist entities.
People will still despise you. They’ll still want to harm you at home. Some actually do it.
Here’s an idea that isn’t so radical. When emerging powers rise, the emerging power must decide whether to pursue peaceful contestation or competition, or, through intention or miscalculation, conflict.
The issue is that in this chaotic environment, we call the international system, we think the Tesla Cybertruck is friendly. It’s a spectacle in fact. Is it a threat? Is it not? Many will go at length to test these ideas in US-China relations. For the victims at the Trump Hotel driveway in Las Vegas, this is far harder to analyze.
My colleague, Ryan Lazarus, speaks about an idea where it's possible to visualize patterns of terrorist behavior on a map in the form of hurricanes. He argues that distributed networks empower vast opportunities for rogue actors in an environment fueled by information systems and decentralization. Rather than looking at a map that shows representations of terrorist activities, you could view the trajectories of the consequential political events, such as a hurricane appearing in a visualization on the weather channel. This would inform the institutions when things are going haywire, give them a moment to understand the trajectory with clarity and adjust more rapidly, and bring us back to a better outcome that steers clear of the turbulent weather pattern. Maybe it even helps institutions avoid unnecessarily exacerbating conditions during periods of contentious politics or provides new metrics for measuring and tracking the emergence of conflict, whether it is civil unrest or civil war.
After the assassination of the UnitedHealth CEO, Brian Thompson, activists rushed to condone the shooters’ actions, citing unjust healthcare systems like claims denials and profits as justification.
41% of young voters said the healthcare CEO’s death was acceptable or somewhat acceptable.
Link to Chart
Undoubtedly, perceptions create windows of opportunity for an activist to be more assertive about their political viewpoint to young audiences. If you think the CEO of UnitedHealth deserved to die, you have strong support amongst your peers between the ages of 18 and 29. Just every day, people who think it’s justified to assassinate a corporate manager.
Without getting into how this changes the security environment, the point is that if you fast forward to today. We have had additional attacks by extreme individuals like New Orleans or Las Vegas, which I mentioned earlier. Some patterns are forming. The mobile devices empowered everything from surveillance videos to the New Orleans attacker recorded on sunglasses or the car rented from Turo. What about the patterns captured on the cameras running image recognition algorithms that the New Orleans police set up to view crowds in and around Bourbon Street?
In a fragmented world, we need more precision, accuracy, granularity, quantitative reasoning, and theories that go beyond the capabilities of social scientists but aren’t quite in the hands of computer scientists or statisticians.
Hurricanes are forming. We need to be able to detect their formation sooner. We need new ways to analyze them and define their meanings. The international system, the global economy, whatever you call it, knows there are pressing risks it can’t quite measure or address. Still, it can be seen, after the fact, the intensity of war or the frequency of protest, the types of rhetoric that include signals, but nothing to synthesize the information into weather patterns, let alone more than a long research paper written mainly from an academic context.
Otherwise, we sit here wondering if this cybertruck is a threat.
Does anyone know? If we knew, maybe we would be better at neutralizing threats, containing the spread, and, while we’re at it, adapting the nature of the institutions to meet the needs of the society in a given period rather than obsessive focus on its own survival, it could integrate humans into its needs. We could fill the void with something constructive; we could deradicalize people, meaning we could behave better as a country and work towards expressing our interests fairly and respectably. We can take care of our own people when they need us. We can stand up to threats to our nation and our allies and partners but in a sustainable way where we more often choose to use soft power over hard power.
We do this because we are Americans, not because we are scared or feel threatened. We don’t go into hiding. We face our fears, and we deal with challenges head-on. We are resourceful people, the most well-resourced on this planet.
Let’s not give this up.
Let’s not make war the imperative, either.