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https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://doctorow.medium.com/underground-empire-da769ee08ae1>
"At the end of Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman’s new book
Underground
Empire, they cite the work of John Lewis Gaddis, “preeminent historian of the
Cold War,” who dubbed that perilous period “The Long Peace”:
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250840554/undergroundempire
Despite several harrowing near-misses, neither of the two hair-trigger,
nuclear-tipped arsenals were ever loosed. When the Cold War ended, the world
breathed a sigh of relief and set about refashioning itself, braiding together
economic and social interdependencies that were supposed to make future war
unthinkable. Nations that depend on one another couldn’t afford to go to war,
because they couldn’t hurt the other without hurting themselves.
The standard account of the Cold War’s “Long Peace” is that the game theorists
who invented Mutually Assured Destruction set up a game where “the only way to
win was not to play” (to quote the Matthew Broderick documentary
War Games).
The interdependency strategy of the post-Cold War, neoliberal, “flat” world was
built on the same fundamentals: make war more costly than peace, victory worse
than the status quo, and war would be over — if we wanted it.
But Gaddis has a different idea. Any effect Mutually Assured Destruction had on
keeping fingers from pushing the buttons was downstream of a much more
important factor: independence. For the most part, the US and the USSR had
nonintersecting spheres of influence. Each of these spheres was
self-sufficient. That meant that they didn’t compete with one another for the
use of the same resource or territory, and neither could put the other in check
by seizing some asset they both relied on. The exceptions to this — proxy wars
in Latin America and Southeast Asia — were the disastrous exceptions that
proved the rule.
But the past forty years rejected this theory. From Thomas Friedman’s “World Is
Flat” to Fukyama’s “End of History,” the modern road to peace is paved with
networks whose nodes can be found in every country. These networks — shipping
routes, money-clearing systems, supply chains, the internet itself — weave
together nearly every nation on Earth into a single web of interdependencies
that make war impossible.
War, you may have noticed, has become very, very possible. Even countries with
their own McDonald’s franchises are willing to take up arms against one
another.
That’s where Farrell and Newman’s book comes in. The two political scientists
tell the story of how these global networks were built through accidents of
history, mostly by American corporations and/or the American state. The web was
built by accident, but the spider at its center was always the USA."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
