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deliver the honestly-earned confidence of the secure. They will provide purchase for the patient work of diplomacy, a marked shift from the crisis-to-crisis lurching of today.

The texture of our values should be everywhere woven into these gatelands we will cultivate: Democratic choice, freedom of thought, privacy. We won’t have time for leisurely deliberation about ideals in the crashing, time-compacted crises ahead, so we should begin with them. Let other nations measure gated enclosures for their different values, marked by their paranoias and historical burdens; our strength will be an order that reflects our habits of civilization. The curious, open-minded searching native to our temperament, for instance. This will force constant innovation and evolution, an antidote to the failure to change that poisons most closed systems. A continued absence of gates will undo us in the short run. But the long run will be a disaster if our gates are inflexible, too closed, incapable of upgrade or – worse – girded by promises and fears that are not naturally our own.

A second principle is that we ought not force anyone else to use our gated systems. Gatekeeper or gatekept? No more profound, painful, liberating or enslaving political choice now exists. Nations must be free to select, in as much as they can, their own terms of enmeshment. Our aim should simply be to build the best order we can. America’s tremendous economic and technical lead serves us – for now, at least – as the isolating stretch of the Atlantic and Pacific once did. There’s no need to force others to follow us. Recall Greshams’ famous “economic law”: The way in which the bad drives out the good. A stock market made of swindlers won’t attract investors for very long. Well, in many networks, a sort of reverse-Gresham’s law applied. The good drives out the bad. By this I don’t mean merely the self-cleaning properties of systems like Wikipedia. But of linked systems more broadly. If one nation runs a DNA database where results are skewed by rules of political power – family members of leaders get special access for instance – it will make it less effective, and therefore less appealing as a gateland. So we should be relaxed about letting Europe or Russia or China try their own gated systems. Their desires reflect sensible, understandable urges. If you were leading a nation would you rely on Washington’s trade or financial commitments? Because of the nature of power now many nations may have no other choice; but forcing them to enmeshment could bring shattering, unnecessary pressure. Let them divide themselves from us; it will only weaken them.

We need not evangelize, invade, or compel our way to power. Consider the case of global trade. For decades after World War Two, many nations sought independence from economic entanglement. They yearned for autarky. They scorned trade. And they nearly bankrupted themselves in the process: Want to buy Portuguese cars? French computers? Indian bikinis? I didn’t think so. The whole point of trade was to solve such imbalances of skill and trade. When the age of connection began after the Cold War, most countries made a decisive shift: They arranged their economies to be attractive to global financial flows. Trade grew twice as fast as the world economy. The cost of being left out was, and is, a nearly impossible burden. American systems, if they work for America, should have the same magnetic appeal,

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