- Non-nation state actors now pose a significant threat to nation states
- Historical threats usually associated with bad nation states, can now be executed by non nation-states
- Industrial Era, was about a consolidation of power, in the past only the Government could run something as complex as a phone network
- In a Post-Industrial Era, it’s about the decentralization or power–today, modern economies privatize and decentralize important things like the phone network. (my comment: The internet is the epitome of this, a fully decentralized network controlled by no one single entity)
- American Foreign Policy, Power Projection and Defence has been fully focused on hard power against nation states (hard power = men with guns)
- In order to address the threat of non nation-states, the US government has pivoted it’s attack vectors and tactics
- Yesterday : Killing someone from a foreign army in a designated war-zone
- Today : Drone Strikes on enemy combatants that aren’t fully recognized
- Yesterday : Capturing Foreign combatants and imprisoning them
- Today : Guantanamo
- Yesterday : Intercepting enemy communications, disabling and sabotaging
- Today : Programs that Edward Snowden revealed
- (my comment: I don’t think the full surveillance of domestic internet traffic was a good idea)
- We’re seeing the melting down of Post WW2 and Post WW1 global order, and maybe even the breakdown of Westphalian nation-states…ISIS is a response to Westphalian ideas of separation of church and state.
- There is a fundamental similarity between what Christian Europe faced in the 16th-17th century and what the middle east today, both sides are debating the relationship between religion and power.
- Christian Europe had the answer of separating them—we call this separation, modern!
- No guarantee that Islam in the Middle East will come to the same conclusion, i.e. they may never become modern.
- Less important stuff about Nuclear power, about how Russia is adopting a Nuclear first option, and considering it de-escalatory. And Hayden doesn’t like the Iran Deal, and not a big fan of Pakistan.
- American foreign policy makers like Hayden are more concerned with Chinese failure than with Chinese success. Political, Economical and Social factors may hamper the growth of China, but a failure of the regime is going to a massive problem for the world, while a success for China would a relatively smaller impact that can easily be folded into the world order.
- The Chinese claims on the 9-dash line, is a nationalistic approach to remedy the economical slowdown (Hayden’s opinion), what’s more interesting is that this is a diplomatic error, and ASEAN countries are running back to America to balance China’s power.
- Fundamentally though, China has no reason to be an enemy of the US
- His last slide on American foreign policy, the 4 different president types, as a fan of Wilson, and a World War 1 History freak—that was awesome!! I think one of the best historically precise frameworks for understanding US foreign policy, that isn’t based just the last 20 years
- Only one country supports targetted killings by the US—Israel.
Michael Hayden on interesting points
M