The
Brutality Cascade
March
4, 2013 By DAVID BROOKS
Let’s
say you were a power hitter during baseball’s steroids era. You may have
objected to steroids on moral and health grounds. But many of your competitors
were using them, so you faced enormous pressure to use them too.
Let’s
say you are a student at a good high school. You may want to have a normal
adolescence. But you are surrounded by all these junior workaholics who have
been preparing for the college admissions racket since they were 6. You find you
can’t unilaterally withdraw from the rat race and still get into the college of
your choice. So you also face enormous pressure to behave in a way you detest.
You
might call these situations brutality
cascades. In certain sorts of competitions, the most brutal player gets to set the rules. Everybody else
feels pressure to imitate, whether they want to or not.
The
political world is rife with brutality cascades. Let’s say you are a normal
person who gets into Congress. You’d rather not spend all your time
fund-raising. You’d like to be civil to your opponents and maybe even work out
some compromises.
But
you find yourself competing against opponents who fund-raise all the time, who
prefer brutalism to civility and absolutism to compromise. Pretty soon you must
follow their norms to survive.
Or
take a case in world affairs. The United States is a traditional capitalist
nation that has championed an open-seas economic doctrine. We think everybody
benefits if global economics is like a conversation, with maximum openness,
mutual trust and free exchange.
But
along comes China, an economic superpower with a more mercantilist mind-set.
Many Chinese, at least in the military-industrial complex, see global economics
as a form of warfare, a struggle for national dominance.
Americans
and Europeans tend to think it is self-defeating to engage in cyberattacks on
private companies in a foreign country. You may learn something, but you
destroy the trust that lubricates free exchange. Pretty soon your trade dries
up because nobody wants to do business with a pirate. Investors go off in
search of more transparent partners.
But
China’s cybermercantilists regard deceit as a natural tool of warfare.
Cyberattacks make perfect sense. Your competitors have worked hard to acquire
intellectual property. Your system is more closed so innovation is not your
competitive advantage. It is quicker and cheaper to steal. They will hate you
for it, but who cares? They were going to hate you anyway. C’est la guerre.
In
a brutality cascade the Chinese don’t become more like us as the competition
continues. We become more like them. And that is indeed what’s happening. The
first thing Western companies do in response to cyberattacks is build up walls.
Instead of being open stalls in the global marketplace, they begin to look more
like opaque, rigidified castles.
Next,
the lines between private companies and Western governments begin to blur. When
Western companies are attacked, they immediately turn to their national
governments for technical and political support. On the one hand, the United
States military is getting a lot more involved in computer counterespionage,
eroding the distance between the military and private companies. On the other
hand, you see the rise of these digital Blackwaters, private security firms
that behave like information age armies, providing defense against foreign
attack but also counterattacking against Chinese and Russian foes.
Pretty
soon the global economy looks less like Monopoly and more like a game of Risk,
with a Chinese military-industrial complex on one part of the board and the
Western military-industrial complex on another part.
Brutality
cascades are very hard to get out of. You can declare war and simply try to
crush the people you think are despoiling the competition.
Or
you can try what might be called friendship circles. In this approach, you
first establish the norms of legitimacy that should govern the competition. You
create a Geneva Convention of domestic political conduct or global cyberespionage.
Then you organize as broad a coalition as possible to agree to uphold these
norms.
Finally,
you isolate the remaining violators and deliver a message: If you join our
friendship circle and abide by our norms, the benefits will be overwhelming,
but if you stay outside, the costs will be devastating.
In
his effort to fight what he regards as Republican zealots, President Obama is
caught between these two strategies. He never quite pushes budget showdowns to
the limit to discredit Republicans, but he never offers enough to the members
of the Republican common-sense caucus to tempt them to break ranks.
Clearly
the second option is better for dealing with the Chinese. Establish a Geneva
Convention that bans cyberactivity against citizens and private companies.
Establish a broad coalition to enforce it.
Unfortunately,
standard-setting is a dying art these days, so we are living with
these brutality cascades.
