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The goals of Hard Gatekeeping are simple enough to state: To protect those inside
the gated order, to make security and innovation more efficient, to accelerate
certain kinds of connection and dampen others, to manage vulnerable links to the
non-gatekept world and – perhaps most important– to use that “in or out” leverage
to relentlessly affect the interests and plans of others. These aims are the root of real
security in any age. “In anarchy, security is the highest end,” Kenneth Waltz wrote.
“Only if survival is assured can states seek other goals such as tranquility, profit and
power.”247 Survival – and Waltz’s other essential aims – will be decided by the
nature of our future connection. In this sense, Hard Gatekeeping produces a decisive
change in our posture. It lets us aim for something instead of merely being against
movement or – hopelessly – against the future. It establishes priorities, clarifies our
real core interests, helps us budget our effort and our expenses – better, perhaps, to
spend a trillon dollars building tools of topological mastery like infrastructure or
new technology than chasing Middle East peace.248 Gatekeeping does not transcend
the long-standing debates between the cold realism of Stalin and the idealism of
Woodrow Wilson so much as it sets us a preliminary task: Shaping the environment.
To build and control the next generation of gatekept systems should be our aim
now. In the future paper currency wil be replaced by secure digital bit transactions.
Genetic information will demand smart, live-connected platforms for efficient
mining and study. Cyber and biological security will each come to be defined by
high-speed, machine-intelligent protocols. All of these are gatekept cores. Mastering
them will be as important as having military bases, trade missions or treaty
arrangements once was. The development of such systems plays to our strengths;
they deliver both security and useful pressures of innovation. Remember – the aim
isn’t to build walls. It is to use the logic of networks and gates, and all the complex
productive force they release.

3.

The elements of Hard Gatekeeping can be stated simply enough:

First, Does it work for us? We seek a landscape of technology, trade, finance,
knowledge – all the tools of power – that balances the pressures of politics with a
colder grasp of longer-term national interest. The protocols, alliances, treaties and
data webs that enable markets, trade or thinking machines – all are gatelands we
can cultivate, improve and protect. Our gatelands must be designed to limit the
rippling risks of contagion or error moving wildly, like spring weather, inside linked
complex systems now. Control of topologies is what air superiority or sea mastery
once were. The opening attacks of future wars will come invisibly and silently
through networks, in space, in fast topological strikes – not with noisy land
invasions or bombing runs. Well-built gates will give us time and leverage. They will

247 “In anarchy”: Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Politics, (Reading, MA:
Addison-Wesley, 1979), 126
248 It establishes: For a discussion about why a grand strategy is of practical use see
Hal Brands, “The Promise and Pitfalls of Grand Strategy,” Strategic Studies Institute,
External Associates Monograph Program, 2012

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