Simple Solutions to Complex Catastrophes

Front matter

A SPRINGER NATURE SDG: 16 S

PRS Sustainable Development Goals Series Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions

Simple Solutions to Complex Catastrophes

Prologue

Speed, Coupling, Complexity

Hyper-Hubs and Hyper-Disruption

Slow, Simple Solutions for a Fast, Complex World What Kind of Simplicity Helps Manage Complexity? Requisite Variety

Summary of Policy Propositions by Chapter

The Policy Hypotheses

Markets in Vice, Markets in Virtue from Climate to Covid Nuclear Weapons and Covid Cannot Be Unmade Conclusion vi

The Ne

Contents and Lesser Wars that Cascade

George Kennan’s Containment

Radicalizing George Kennan and Hedley Bull Realism The Puzzle of Nuclear Weapon States that Rarely Invade Weak States

Summarizing the Modern History of Invasions

War Made Past Empires

Why Indonesia Grows Toward Becoming a Future Great el Vision of a Nuclear Peace

nviolence Alternative of Timor-Leste Plus 21 Abolitionist States

Civil Resistance Often Works in Contemporary Conditions

The Puzzle That the Wealthiest Societies are Militarily

Weak

Temporary Alliances to Contain Nuclear War Threats

Historic Spikes of Short-Range Nucl ile Covert Distrust of Free Russians by Western Neocons and Hawks References

Containing China: Containing Temporarily Permanently De-Containing China and Every Society lee =

Conecining aa

Implications of Containing ‘Rogue States

for Containing a ‘Rogue Russia’

Contain Threats; Abandon Long-Term Containment of States

Containment of Threats

Resurrecting Andrew Mack

77 78 80

82 91 94

97 98

100 103

105 114 126

Contents

Drivers of Optimism About Peace The Big Picture of Catastrophe Prevention References

— — Systems ir dless Unbalancing of Equilibria: Al, |, MADD, aes from the Past The ‘One-Eyed Man’

Terror and the Harm Principle for Restorative Universities

Persuading India and Pakistan

Scaling Up Regional Dynamics of Disarmament Leadership by Universities for Doomsday Machine Defection

WMD Whistleblowers, Super-Intelligence,

St Deterrence

What is Restorative Diplomacy?

Super-Soft Diplomacy

Diverse Deposits in the Adversary’s Bank

that Compensates for Competition

rial Competition, Strong Cooperation r Dialogue

Realist Profession

Good and Evil in the Heart of the Spymaster Renewing America’s Ethical Core Diplomatically References

Nuclear and Regime-Change Diplomacy: the Restorative Critique

Nuclear Diplomacy

Nuclear Weapon Mishaps vii

188 204 214

219 220 225

239 243 248

249 254

256 264

269 275 277

305 305 307 viii

Contents

Nuclear Surety Inspection as Restorative Regulatory Diplomacy

Beyond Neocon or Realist Verities

onal Excellence in Diplomacy

Public Diplomacy for Uncertain Times

The Ethos of Winning

Interfering in the Domestic Politics of Others Does Foreign Electoral Interference Work?

Violent Interventions in Foreign Domestic Politics Catastrophic Success

d Global Politics

Regulatory Ritualism

Responsive Regulation to Contain Risk

Return to Street-Level Bureaucracy

Conclusion: Principles for Transcending Ritualism References

Requisite Variety and Simple Institutional Virtues Thinking Dialectically About Complexity

My Controversial Simplifications

The Ambulance Metaphor Revisited

Many Disparate Simple Institutions

Early Detection; Early Response

Overdetermined Prevention: Simple Versus Complex Dialectics

Thinking Systemically About Simple Institutions

to Prioritize

Rally Behind Front-Line Workers of Crisis Prevention Institutions

Index

418 421

424 426

About the Author

John Braithwaite is an Emeritus Distinguished Professor of the Australian National University, and an interdisciplinary scholar of peacebuilding, war crime, business crime, criminological theory, and regulation and governance. He founded and was the first Director of the School of Regulation and Global Governance (RegNet) at ANU Many of his previous works can be downloaded from johnbraithwaite.com.

Abbreviations

Artificial Intelligence

Association of South East Asian Nations Automated Teller Machine

Bank of Credit and Commerce International Bougainville Revolutionary Army

Chief Executive Officer

United States Central Intelligence Agency Democratic Republic of Congo

European Union

Gross Domestic Product

Graduated Reciprocation in Tension-Reduction International Atomic Energy Agency International Monetary Fund

International Relations

Irish Republican Army

Mutual Assured Destruction

Mutual Assured Digital Destruction

North Atlantic Treaty Organization Non-Government Organization

United States National Security Council xi xii Abbreviations

PPE Personal Protective Equipment R&D Research and Development UN United Nations

WHO World Health Organization WMD Weapons of Mass Destruction

A)

Prologue

Abstract This book is optimistic in explaining why simple institutions and principles societies can strengthen to help humankind control complex catastrophes that endanger the planet. Security realities of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) do compel pessimism. Yet my argument is that it is possible to abolish WMDs. The journey of a revived peace movement can grow institutional capability to conquer climate catastrophe, pandemics, economic crises, and to secure peace from smaller wars. The book develops a dialectics of alternating between understanding complex ways of grappling with complexity and simple principles that are generative of nuanced response to complexity.

Keywords Complexity - Dialectics - Peace movement - Environment - Financial crises

This book is optimistic in explaining why simple institutions and principles societies can strengthen to help humankind control complex catastrophes that endanger the planet. Security realities of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) do compel pessimism. Yet my argument is that it is possible to abolish WMDs. The journey of a revived peace

© The Author(s) 2024 1 J. Braithwaite, Simple Solutions to Complex Catastrophes, Sustainable Development Goals Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-03 1-48747-7_1 movement toward achieving that will increase institutional capabilities to conquer climate catastrophe, pandemics, economic crises, and to secure peace from smaller wars. Nuclear calamity is an ugly topic. Denial and forgetting are natural human responses. My pitch to readers who care about environmental politics, policies to prevent the globalization of disease, and the dominations of the financialization of capitalism, platform capitalism, and surveillance capitalism is that pathways to transformation there can be unblocked by a peace movement that makes progress on WMD abolition.

A human species that has survived thousands of generations is likely to exist for no more than a century or two unless nuclear weapons are rapidly minimized, followed by progress toward abolishing them completely, alongside all WMDs. No strategy of abolition, no enduring survival. Yet with a strategy that falls short of full success, sustainable human development, human flourishing, and survival of humankind are probable. By destroying most (not all) nuclear weapons can we prevent weapons from destroying most (not all) of us. A world with fewer than 100 nuclear weapons is a threat to the planet but not an existential one; it would take at least 100 nuclear weapons striking urban areas to cause nuclear winter.

Payne (2020) documents huge numbers of generals, admirals, and defense secretaries enmeshed in the nuclear deterrence regime who came out in retirement to say that nuclear deterrence was irrational, ridden with logical flaws and contradictions, assumptions that were untested, untestable, implausible. These generals, admirals, and defense secretaries emerged from the closet as nuclear abolitionists. Even generals who are not WMD abolitionists often show how dubious they are about nuclear deterrence doctrines, for example saying: ‘Firing off 1000 or 500 or 2000 nuclear warheads on a few minutes’ consideration has always struck me as an absurd way to go to war’ (General William Odom in Payne 2020, 104).

People say abolition is a pipe dream because the defense establishment of great powers always resists giving up their weapons. The historical record suggests quite the opposite (Payne 2020; Holloway 2011; Neuneck 2011; Rydell 2011). During the periods of US history when incumbent presidents said publicly that they would get behind a move

1 Prologue 3 toward total abolition, as Presidents Truman, Kennedy, Reagan, and Obama did very explicitly in their time, dozens of former generals, defense secretaries, national security advisors and secretaries of state, including formidable hawks like Henry Kissinger, came out publicly in agreement, arguing that new realities, new evidence, made the old arguments for nuclear deterrence obsolete. Old generals have grandchildren too. The pipedream analysis grew even after these surges in strategic support for abolition because Stalin would not support Truman's abolitionism, Putin would not support Obama's even though Putins predecessor did support Obama’s step by step abolitionism before President Medvedev was replaced by Putin’s return to the Presidency, Kennedy was assassinated, Reagan’s term ended and a coup terminated his Moscow partner, Gorbachev, who advocated abolition before Reagan advocated it. One day, hope and history will rhyme, and abolitionist incumbents of the great powers will together ratify the 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. The alternative historical possibility, this book argues, is that the great powers will wipe each other out before that day arrives.

I argue that we owe our descendants no less a guarantee than step by step progress toward abolition of WMDs; social movements we join can deliver it; and although the challenges are complex; they are not impossibly complex. I conclude that prioritizing Sustainable Development Goal 17 (Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions) by preventing wars and rebuilding justice with strong institutions after wars, opens a wide path to other Sustainable Development Goals, particularly Climate Action (13), Affordable and Clean Energy (7), No Poverty (1), Zero Hunger (2), Good Health and Wellbeing (3), Quality Education (4), Gender Equality (5), and Reduced Inequalities (10).

Movement has sadly been in the opposite direction since the politics of peace unraveled after the ill-fated Arab Spring in 2011. A problem is the propensity for wars to cascade to other catastrophes—economic, famine, pandemics, Ozone hole reopening, and climate change. Notwithstanding these realities, a politics of hope works better for humankind than nihilism. There are realistic strategies for containing war and tempering the other crises that cascade with it. By tempering these other crises, international society can reduce risks of them cascading to nuclear war.

At the time of writing, we see the problem with the war in Ukraine. Cooperation between Western and Russian university scientists on what great carbon powers like Russia and the United States need to do to tame the climate crisis has ceased. Instead of the United States, Europe, and Russia collaborating to assist each other to achieve the kind of reforestation of their large land masses that China has been achieving, Russia, the EU, and United States pour ever more weapons into Ukraine to blow ecosystems out of the soil. Tanks, aircraft, and other military materiel worldwide exhale carbon dioxide at scale onto the climate crisis, 2,750 million tons in 2022 according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Both sides are responsible for shelling at the largest nuclear plant in Europe, setting fire on one occasion to this dirty bomb waiting to happen. The oppression and anxiety of Ukrainians forced to work at the plant and live nearby under such threat by the Russian occupation was a war crime. Cooperation between NATO and Russian epidemiologists on future pandemic prevention ground to a halt since that war started in 2014.

This book argues that war and environmental destruction have been deep-rooted causes of pandemics in the era of the globalization of disease. Not only has collaboration between NATO and Russian regulators ceased toward financial crisis prevention, the talents of financial regulators have been conscripted to causing global financial crises that start in the enemy economy, but that have already spilled to global inflation, debt, and food insecurity for the planet’s poorest people. Ukraine is no more than a tragic contemporary illustration of a general principle that peace is generative; it turns off taps that fuel the fires of crises; peace reconnects taps of crisis prevention knowhow.

My approach is first to understand the complex connections among crises. Then I argue that the best starting point for containing crises is to identify some simple principles and institutions that are generative of better control of the complexity of catastrophes. The first of these is peace itself. The book advocates not only soft diplomacy, but super-soft diplomacy, a diplomacy that abandons containment of Russia and China, replacing this with nourishing cooperative, collaborative problem-solving among competing great powers. At the same time, I advocate a kind of super-intelligence among intelligence agencies to detect cheating on

1 Prologue 5 treaties that ban WMDs, treaties that require carbon emission reductions, combined with a distinctive kind of responsive deterrence. That deterrence goes to reform of the international law of extradition to protect whistleblowers. Those who treasonously disclose illicit WMD programs and other programs to game treaties that protect us against WMDs must be revered. We can protect them. It is proposed that intelligence agencies of all states share knowledge on covert WMD programs (super-intelligence) and that states commit to a duty to support chokepoint sanctions and to a last resort of conventional military attacks on the WMD programs of states that cheat on anti- WMD treaties. Collaborative commitment to this against a rogue WMD user should mean that this last resort is never needed.

The combination of extradition reform, a large enough temporary coalition to control a diverse array of contextual chokepoints, plus diverse conventional weapon capabilities might assemble a novel kind of super-deterrence executed by a temporary UN-sanctioned super-alliance. It only needs to hold together for long enough to secure WMD destruction in a rogue state. Put another way, the imperative for averting an irreparable cascade of many catastrophes might be for states to cooperate with their enemies on these solutions. This, after all, is what Churchill and FDR did in cooperating with Stalin to defeat the existential threat of fascism. That coalition lacked the chokepoint capabilities enabled by the coupled character of today’s networked complexity. Chokepoints are chancy for aggressive single powers, however great they are. The complexly coupled flux of the world economy means that it is hard for any single great power to be sure that closing a chokepoint to another great power will not cause the other power and its allies to surprise it with their control of what turns out to be a more devastating array of chokepoints. The world economy can disengage from corporations that apply chokepoints against enemy states. Hence aggressive powers can stumble by cutting off the chokepoint branches on which they sit. Responsive regulation of WMD threats with chokepoints has therefore become potent but is most potent as a weapon of a large coalition of states, riskier as the weapon of a rogue great power.

My argument is that there are some simple solutions that go to the heart of how to tame complex catastrophes. We must also cultivate institutions that allow us to comprehend complexity. This is a book about the dialectics of movement between simple solutions and complex responsiveness to crises. The best path to pandemic prevention is to start with consensus on a simple preventive institution—a pandemic preparedness agency, as the European Union has recently institutionalized. The idea of such an institution, however, is that it will help societies to grapple with the complexity of pandemic response. The successful Taiwanese prototype of a preparedness plan swung into action in January 2021. It had no fewer than 124 discrete measures it was ready to mobilize against covid’s complex evolution. The thesis of a simple imperative for a pandemic preparedness institution has the antithesis of a 124-point plan of some complexity. Wicked problems do require design thinking like this Taiwanese plan. The paradox here is that a simple institutional idea creates an institution that is generative of multifaceted responsiveness to complexity.

Please dear reader help by writing to me when you find any of the howlers that doubtless lurk in a book that ranges widely over terrain that I know quite well, but other terrain that I do not. My thanks to endless support from my beloved partner Valerie Braithwaite who engaged me on this book since 1972, for the support of all the family, including Brian, but especially Sari. Thanks to a hundred other co-authors, friends, former colleagues, and students across the world. My conversations with you helped in ways I hope you might see. Special thanks to my Palgrave editor Josie Taylor for being so helpful as she saw some vision in the book and to anonymous reviewers.

John Braithwaite

Holloway, David 2011. The vision of a world free of nuclear weapons. In Getting to zero: The path to nuclear disarmament, ed. Catherine M. Kelleher and Judity Reppy. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

1 Prologue 7

Neuneck, Gotz. 2011. Getting to zero: The path to nuclear disarmament, ed. Catherine M. Kelleher and Judity Reppy. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Payne, Rodger A. 2020. Stigmatization by ridicule. In Non-nuclear peace: Beyond the nuclear ban treaty, ed. T. Sauer, J. Kustermans, and B. Segaert. London: Palgrave.

Rydell, Randy 2011. Advocacy for nuclear disarmament: A global revival?. Getting to zero: The path to nuclear disarmament, ed. Catherine M. Kelleher and Judity Reppy. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

A)

Abstract Improved peacemaking, and step by step progress toward abolition of Weapons of Mass Destruction helps prevent environmental, pandemic, and financial catastrophes. Across four kinds of crises first prioritize simple principles and simple institutions that prevent coupled catastrophes from cascading one to the other. The next step is to pursue requisite variety in responses by diagnosing dialectically when additional interventions will and will not add value for crisis control. Societies can refine slow-food cooking of crisis response plans. A slow-food approach to growing simple institutions can be iteratively responsive to complexity. This is so when institutions are designed for capability to scale up during crises, to be generative, and to be evidence-based learning institutions that gradually accumulate wisdom to confront complexity.

Keywords Complexity - Environment - Pandemics - Nuclear war - Financial crises

© The Author(s) 2024 9 J. Braithwaite, Simple Solutions to Complex Catastrophes, Sustainable Development Goals Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-03 1-48747-7_2

Speed, Coupling, Complexity

Complexity of risk is something modernity accelerates. So is coupling of risk from one kind of crisis to another kind, and speed in the globalization of crises. Crises today cascade faster into one another. This is true of economic and ecological crises, the globalization of disease, and security crises. Crises develop increasingly rapidly because of accelerating innovation in global capitalism. Social media platform innovation accelerated the rapid spread of lies to the point of outpacing older, simpler institutions for the proliferation of truths. This includes lies that motivate new forms of dangerous behavior like advocating a coup to put right an allegedly stolen election, or the lie that war can be waged to sustain a new Caliphate to conquer the Middle East and Africa.

Improved professionalization in the proliferation of falsehoods led to election of climate change deniers during the very period of history when it became too late for fully effective catastrophe prevention. New technologies of cyberwarfare, cybercrime and cyberterrorism, new space warfare by electromagnetic and cyberspace technologies, and new ways of disabling them in space, may cascade to horrific hails of space wars. Coupled cascades put us at risk from cyber-threats that tip security systems toward cascades of nuclear weapons use by accident, miscalculation, or linkages to faulty technologies.

Russia, China, and the United States may not be far from capability for multiple forms of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD), not only MAD by nuclear weapons, but also Mutual Assured Digital Destruction (MADD) through digital time bombs planted, ready to explode on demand, in electricity grids and other systems that serve nuclear weapons targeting, hospitals, telecommunications, and more. They would explode with malware designed to activate during a crisis. No one knows how advanced great powers are in achieving MADD capability. Only technological pessimists could think that while kinetic MAD is within their grasp, cyber MADD never will be.

The June 27, 2017 cyber-attack on Ukraine by Russia turned Ukrainian screens black everywhere. Money could not be withdrawn from ATMs. Ukrainians could not be paid, send or receive mail, pay at gas stations, or buy a train ticket or groceries. Worse, Ukraine could not monitor radiation levels at Chernobyl and Zaporigia. This combined with effects on hospitals rendered the cyber-attack a war crime against humanity. NATO-based companies with major operations in Ukraine were also devastated. Merck and Fedex alone were hobbled at a cost of $1 billion as the Russian malware infected their worldwide communications (Perlroth 2021, 18). A couple of years later, before and after covid and when Ukraine staggered from an unprecedented measles outbreak, Russian trolls surged anti-vaccination dogmas across Facebook accounts of young Ukrainian mothers (Perlroth 2021, 19). War cascaded to escalated epidemic severity.

Russia also attacks NATO states with anti-vaccination messages intended to cause health harm, but more fundamentally to sew division in ways that intersect with other cleavages based on politics, race, neo- Nazi belief systems, class, and religion. Other states target Russia and China in the same ways; others target this kind of sewing of internal divisions against Israel; Israel in turn sews divisions among Palestinians and Iranians. From unimagined sources seeds are sown for future fascism and war. The argument of this book is that restorative diplomacy, genuine healing among old enemies, is the fundamental solution to this problem that has worked again and again throughout history in persuading old enemies against future meddling in one anothers domestic politics. It is just that restorative prevention and healing are more imperative than in the past, during an era when cyber operations are almost totally undeterrable and do such great crime and war harm that is extremely difficult to prevent technologically. Cybercrime is already the most common and damaging form of property crime for these reasons (Braithwaite 2022); soon cyberwar could become the most harmful form of warfare when the first case of Mutual Assured Digital Destruction turns all the screens black on both sides of alliances fighting a large war.

Russia would be better off had it restored diplomatic relationships with NATO states so they stopped meddling in Russia’s internal affairs, ended financial sanctions against Russia, ceased costly proxy warfare against Russia to defend Ukraine. The United States would be better off had it not provoked Putin to meddle in US politics without which Donald Trump would have been defeated by Hilary Clinton in 2016

(Levin 2020). That meddling has been so effective in dividing Americans against one another that even a coup against an elected government could be attempted. It has been effective in stoking fires of neo-fascism in America, in costing US companies losses as high as a billion dollars from Russian hacks, in causing US taxpayers to suffer an inflation shock and the loss of trillions of dollars preparing Ukraine for war only to see its ally lose big chunks of its territory. A continuation of great power politics as usual is a lose-lose game compared to restorative diplomacy that heals the hurts that motivate all these crimes and weakens both great powers vis a vis China (Chapter 8).

Mutual Assured Destruction capabilities with the satellite communications that allow aircraft to land, and other critical forms of communication may not be far off. Russia and China can already destroy the coupling of financial systems and the internet between Europe and the United States. Subsea cables are responsible for 97% of the data and information flows of transcontinental communication and finance (Acharya 2023). Enemies can cut cables somewhere along a vast ocean floor without being detected. Early in 2022 when Russian President Putin was rattling his nuclear saber, Britain and NATO messaged that cutting submarine cables would be ‘an act of war’ (Bone 2022).

This is an example of chokepoint deterrence because there is little prospect this century that humankind could build the number of satellites that would be required with the bandwidth of what cables can do. Russia cut trans-Atlantic cables on a number of occasions during milder crises of the Cold War. Repairing them can take weeks; then they can be cut again. Or Russia could then follow up by cutting another between the United States and Japan/Korea. The United States could reciprocate. Russia is coupled by cable to a lot less wealth than could be destroyed via the coupling of the United States with Europe or Japan. The coupling most vital to Russia since the war in Ukraine commenced is to China and its allies, not vulnerable cable connections across vast oceans. Google is doing it alone to build its own undersea cable to link its North and South American operations and data centers. This may be an attractive Russian escalation target along some future Russian trajectory to threatening MADD—with few Russian companies traveling that line. MADD by this means requires cutting many cables at once because single cuts can be re-routed along an alternative line, though with significant cost. Something that may have protected the West from the concerted attacks on undersea cables may be that China is a big player in the telecommunications and subsea cable industry. On the one hand, that is not much of an assurance perhaps for a future war with China, backed by Russia. On the other hand, this is another instance of how economic interdependence retains the potential to motivate peacemaking.

Coupling makes us wealthier and more capable of solving problems. Yet the more coupled, the more vulnerable we are. This book argues that because we can no longer ‘contain’ our enemies from cutting our coupling, nor they contain us from cutting theirs, there is no choice but to get better at turning enemies into friends. We can beat cyberbombs into cybershares that plough furrows of digital and quantum cooperation. We must beat nuclear bombs into nuclear fusion that we share to solve our mutual climate and energy crises. Fear of MADD can motivate the peace movement to educate us on where to seek shelter inside buildings when a nuclear mushroom cloud appears on the horizon. It is a mistake to think that messages on what to do will appear on our screens and airwaves; they may all turn blank at the moment the mushroom appears.

Hence, a second fundamental of this book is that rapidity of change is compounded by the tightly coupled character of crises. As Warren Buffet said of the international economic crisis in 2008, risks today are more coupled than in the past, so the collapse of a US bank more readily cascades to collapse of European banks. This is a fact of life. It is also a fact that we become wealthier as banks sell to one another. Bank dominoes fell at first because they were infected with securitized US subprime loans that were bad loans; in no time banks were collapsing because other banks were. Banks did not know how infected with bad loans other banks might be. So they stopped trusting them. This bleeding rapidly congealed the lifeblood of interbank lending.

A tipping point toward systemic collapse was passed when interest rates on risky interbank lending became so high that banks were stuck with bundles of mortgages in good loans. They were unable to sell them to prop up their liquidity. They could not pay their debts. The only line of credit they could access was taxpayer bailout. Risk therefore became both more complex and more systemic. Systemic risks are risks that result in crises of whole systems, as opposed to breakdowns of bits of systems. Systemic risk means that collapse of one bit of a system cascades to many bits infecting other bits with catastrophe. In contemporary risk societies (Beck 1992) characterized by compressed space-time (Harvey 1989) and just-in-time logistics for ensuring that all capital is at work rather than tied into inventory, risk complexity can cascade quickly to systemic global crises.

Hyper-Hubs and Hyper-Disruption

Rapid cascades of tightly coupled crises is a terrible consequence of the complexity of a more interconnected world; yet there are many positives. Our generation has been able to visit diverse societies in a way our forebears could not. We are more able to connect to people of other lands, electronically and face-to-face, to taste their food and wine, and to enjoy collaboration with them. Electronically enabled collaboration allowed us to learn faster by catalyzing collective genius. The internet can connect fragments of knowledge to build better, or fragment and destroy knowledge because internet platforms are more profitable when sensational lies cascade than when they connect the dots of banal truths. Money is made rekindling movements based on internet-facilitated falsehoods as different as Islamic State, neo-fascism, pedophilia promotion, and movements for coups.

Network effects have a complexity that can reduce risks of crises until critical thresholds are crossed that are tipping points to systemic risk. A more globalized trading system can mean that if a key supplier collapses in a domestic market, a new one can be found in a foreign market. On the other hand, if banks across the world fear they are at risk from being seen as infected with a collapsing asset class, most might freeze lending, as we saw with that 2008 tipping point. A small number of commandingheights hubs with a large number of interconnections makes for more fragility to cascading global crises than a system with many peripheral nodes of moderate connectivity (Goldin and Vogel 2010, 6-7). This was a lesson learnt from World War I; an alliance structure that tied one set of countries to a Berlin hub that felt threatened and encircled, another to a London hub, locked many allies into a world war that previously would have been more regional. Moscow’s fear of encirclement today is not so dissimilar to Berlin’s complex of fears in 1914.

With the globalization of disease, we saw how fast death moves if a major Chinese city (Wuhan) becomes a virus node, then in quick succession big European (Milan) and American cities (New York). One helpful thing about previous initial nodes of epidemics is that they spread from rather rural nodes in peripheral parts of the world system (Africa and Iraq with ebola, HIV, and MERS). There were no major international airports, streams of tourists, or businesspeople wanting to invest along Congo's Ebola River, nor across the border regions between Iraq, Iran, and Syria where MERS jumped from camels to nomadic herders.