Two Short Book Reviews: Winkler’s “Nexus”, Nichols “Eve of Destruction”
NOTE: I will eventually turn this post into a column. I have been intending to review Nichols’ book since March. I got to read Winkler’s book in galley and got a copy in the mail ten days ago.
Two books published this year admirably reflect history renewed and history pending, Jonathan Reed Winkler’s Nexus: Strategic Communications and American Security in World War I (Harvard, 2008) and Thomas M. Nichols’ Eve of Destruction: The Coming Age of Preventive War (Univ of Pennsylvania Press, 2008).
Winkler’s book provides a lesson in the evolutionary nature of technological change. Winkler explores the first global internet – the international telegraph cable system that began shrinking Planet Earth at the end of the 19th century.
Winkler illustrates that the “new” is rarely a radical break with the past. Undersea cables broke the great silence of strategic distance, establishing the first near-instantaneous global communications network. The hackers on this internet literally hacked cables.
As the 20th century dawned, Great Britain emerged as the global information power. “The world’s cable industry was almost entirely in British hands,” Winkler writes. Britain had the cable-laying ships and controlled production of gutta-percha, the choice “latex wrap” for insulating long-distance cable. Britain had a lead in wireless radio—the next-wave global link. Moreover, Britain had encouraged “countries to land their cables in Britain and overseas colonies…ensuring…their communications came under British control in wartime.”
When World War One broke out the British “hacked” German cables and immediately tapped both cable and wireless radio traffic (on its “Marconi wireless” stations). This produced an intelligence coup, and gave Britain imposing economic and political advantages. US international traders remained at the mercy of the British cable and wireless companies. Hence the jacket blurb by Richard Fernandez (The Belmont Club): “In a landmark book, Winkler shows how most of the issues of the information economy– and its handmaiden, infromation security– were thrust up on the US by World War I, when the naiton found that British domination of the cable infrastructure, combined with London’s strategic grasp of its possibilities, reduced the US to a humiliating dependence.”
Everything went through the British “filter.” British cable dominance echoes current US Internet dominance– at least distantly.
Thomas Nichols teaches at US Naval War College. The Coming Age of Preventive War is not a Beltway Clerk’s wonk tome about how fine the world would be if people with multi-syllabic vocabularies and the right kind of friends were running it. This is a warfighter’s book.
Nichols argues the “previous pillars” of order – tradition, international law, “concrete deterrence” —can “no longer promise the protection they once did.” The Westphalian idea of “absolute” state sovereignty is over (think Kosovo) and all institutions “founded upon it” (eg, the UN) are “in transition.” The emergence of Al Qaeda-type terrorists defeats the “logic” of Cold War-type deterrence and weapons of mass destruction in terrorist arsenals make the risk of a misjudgment too great. Yes, these ideas have been aired for the better part of two decades, but Nichols relentless focus on the “burden of action” and “the consequences of inaction” brings a grim, command decision frame the discussion, a “grimness” the author acknowledges.
Nichols sees three choices: (1) “continue to pretend the status quo is viable…” (denial choice) or (2) “great powers will increasingly grant to each other the exceptional right to use violence as they will” (“global jungle” choice). The second choice produces a system where small nations face “a system based on coercion rather than comity.” Nichols tentative third choice is reforming international institutions, beginning with the UN. He favors a McCain-type Community of Democracies, but considers other reforms. For example, membership in the General Assembly “derives” from simple existence, but Security Council membership “would be a privilege earned by a state’s behavior, both internal and external.”
Will it work? I’m not so sure, but Nichols makes the case the age of preventive war has already begun. “We don’t have to like that fact,” he writes, “but we do have to deal with it.”
