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linked topologies250. Contagions, panics, economic brain freezes – these are the essential tactics of our future. The maintenance of our centrality on the topologies we rely on is, then, the essential part of our future security. Interrupting this is, of course, exactly the edge our enemies seek against us: To infect us – with panic, terror or some virtual or real virus. To alter the landscape with one sharp razor slice, not a hail of bombs.

There is no excuse for us to not prepare to struggle in these new terms. Our military must be shifted for the demands of such instant, cross-space attack. But it’s more than that. In recent years America has gotten into a habit of reaching for our military tool, and while we’ve strengthened it to an historically unprecedented degree, we’ve let other skills atrophy. Our real aim should be to stop our opponents from adapting, evolving and connecting to us. If we suffer some strategic, nation-crippling defeat in the future, I don’t think it will be because our military was weak. Rather it will be because we’ve not mastered all the other tools of topological control. The first sign of our real awarness of this will be when the old, foolishly vulnerable systems and tactics and ideas are replaced. We should never build another aircraft carrier without a sense of new, networked naval plan. The idea of spending hundreds of billions for manned bomber planes is absurd. We should embrace self-imposed limits, we should force ourselves to innovate both with our military and in the creation of new tools of policy. Doing so will prevent any number of conflicts. And it will stiffen our temperament to unconventional thinking.

There’s a lean efficiency to these five principles that define Hard Gatekeeping. The strategy echoes, in its clarity, in its clean frugality, the postures of some of the most enduring orders in human history: The “defense in depth” of the Roman Empire, for instance. The protective order of Tokugawa Japan. The walls of Tang China, part of a chained national history that celebrates heroes as “defenders of the nation,” not attackers. Gatekeeping resists unnecessary profligacy. It limits the need to proselytize or colonize or force others to our way of thinking. And it has a universal aspect: Hard Gatekeeping can – with a little imagination and some discipline – be laid on puzzles like terrorism, cyberattacks, US-China relations, order in the Middle East, the proliferation of nuclear weapons, income inequality and global warming. It provides a sharp single image of what we’re after – and guidelines for getting there. It’s clear enough what we need to do, I think. Build gates. Use them. Hold inside them and protect the curious, innovative and revolutionary spirit of our people and our age.

4.

Let’s use this approach to examine some particular problems, and let’s start with US-China ties – a puzzle whose resolution may be the decisive act of policy in the

250 Super spreaders: Manlio De Domenico, Albert Sole´-Ribalta, Elisa Omodei, Sergio Gomez & Alex Arenas, “Ranking in Interconnected Multilayer Networks Reveals Versatile Nodes”, Nature Communications April 23, 2015

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