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decide the religion of his state. The treaties that settled this debate in 1648 – after the most devastating wars in European history at that time – established Cuius regio, eius religio as the governing principle. Whose realm, whose religion. The very notion of a “state” is itself being eroded as topologies, migrations, and superfast data links eat at old borders. But nations remain an essential container of power. A rapid collapse of that system would be a disaster, and is frankly unlikely. To be American. French. Chinese. This still matters.

Do we demand that other nations use our protocols? Do we force China or Germany to rules of transparency, data tracking of their citizens and research that we obey? No. Cuius reticulum, eius reticulum. Whose realm, whose network. But, at the same time, should we permit China or Germany to force another nation into its trading regime? It’s biological or cyber networks? To the question, “What would America fight against in a gatekept world?” one answer is this: We would resist any attempt to force-fit a nation to a gated order. We should prepare for difficult, expensive fights to maintain this principle. Russia watching neighboring states seduced into a Chinese trading order or an American technological system won’t bubble with silent acquiescence. Arrangements that tilt trade to one side of the Pacific will unnerve China or Japan – or the US. But, in the end, the control logic of cuius reticulum buffers us, as a sort of law, against a wilder madness of collapsed nations.

Fifth, we should not permit the emergence of any means to destroy our system. The very efficiency of connected architectures makes them vulnerable. Networks, by design, have holes that particular modes of attack can exploit. Contagion. Strikes against central nodes.249 Arms racing of a certain type. Our first attempt to limit risk should be defensive. Better gates. But we’d be foolish to stop there. Gates, the Trojans would remind us, are not enough. When truly existential dangers emerge – nuclear weapons, certain types of artificial intelligence or genetic engineering – then we must attack. Hard Gatekeeping should include a coiled, prepared readiness to strike with the same light-speed movement that defines the dangers we fear. Of course we should try to deter such attacks. But we should be realistic. There’s much we can’t deter. And the cost of attack is awfully cheap. We won’t be truly safe without battle plans and diplomatic gambits that can hammer at the topological and real world vulnerabilities of our enemies. After all, they will be hammering on ours.

Our defense task is simple to say, hard to achieve: From the largest symmetrical superpower in history, America needs to become the greatest asymmetrical one – capable of devastating, instant action anywhere in the real or topological world. Network scientists who study the power of “centrality” have shown the way that certain positions in a topology – think of a rainforest, a travel network or a stock exchange – wield unusual influence. Centrality of a certain node in linked systems can determine control, it can produce “super spreaders” which instantly shape

249 Strikes against: I.A. Kovacs, A-L. Barabasi, “Destruction Perfected,” Nature (News & Views) 2015, 524, 38-39

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