Two decades ago, the first of what has evolved into a full baker’s dozen of my published books went under contract, marking a shift from my prolific writing of articles and book chapters to much longer-winded and more in-depth and nuanced format for theoretical reflection. While I started out my life of scholarship as an IR Theorist, it was my field-based works on Arctic geopolitics, international relations and multilevel governance that came to press first, and which in turn deeply influenced my approach to IR Theory (as discussed previously in “My Realist Journey.”) Below, I will explore the chapter of my life of scholarship that emerged from my Arctic journey, away from the groupthink of Cold War-era IR Theory, as informed and inspired by the Arctic as a distinct and alternative model for world politics and IR Theory.
In this retrospective journey through my books on Arctic international relations and multilevel governance, “My Arctic Journey,” I extract and develop a comprehensive macro-theory of international relations (IR) and geopolitical order based on my decades of research in and on the Arctic. Across my oeuvre of published books and articles, I present a shift away from top-down, state-centric and (IMHO) overly fatalistic Westphalianisn toward a bottom-up model of collaborative sovereignty and stability. My work in IR Theory discussed above (“My Realist Journey”) bridges the gap between raw, material realism and identity-driven constructivism through Constructive Realism, which informs my understanding of Arctic IR and multilevel governance, rooted in the durability and salience of tribal polities in world politics, yielding what I call Fourth Image Theory, an innovative framework that explains, describes and predicts how sub-state actors ultimately anchor global politics.
The literature and core concepts I have developed follow an interconnected trajectory across my oeuvre of published works:
Breaking the Ice (2008): In this book, I establish the historical and theoretical foundation of my work, examining how indigenous populations in Alaska and Northern Canada transitioned from marginalized groups into central actors in Arctic governance. I introduce the concept of sovereign duality (or hybrid sovereignty) to show how comprehensive land claim agreements (LCAs) allowed native communities to balance ancient traditional frameworks with modern Westernized corporate and public government systems without losing their cultural identity.
On Thin Ice (2009): Transitioning directly to international relations theory, I use this work to introduce my “Fourth Image”—the tribal or sub-state indigenous level of analysis—to correct a structural blind spot in Kenneth Waltz’s traditional three-image framework. Using the rapid geopolitical changes of the polar thaw, I illustrate the successful synthesis of tribe and state, highlighting how a nation’s Arctic sovereignty relies heavily on continuous indigenous occupancy and co-management systems. I also issue a warning regarding the potential for “Inuit fundamentalism” if socioeconomic gaps widen between indigenous corporate elites and remote local communities.
Arctic Doom, Arctic Boom (2009/2010): Here, I shift to a macro-level evaluation of the geopolitical impacts of climate change, presenting the melting ice cap as a structural double-edged sword. I contrast the “Doom” of ecological and cultural disruptions with the “Boom” of newly exposed maritime routes and oil reserves, framing the thawing Arctic Ocean as a “New Mediterranean” transit basin where resource-rich indigenous corporations have the leverage to become the new “Saudi Royals” of the polar world.
Arctic Exceptionalism: Cooperation in a Contested World (2024): In this recent update, written in the wake of the post-2022 freeze of the Arctic Council, I mount a robust, realist defense of the Arctic as an enduring zone of peace. I argue that the region’s hostile environment makes unilateral conflict logistically prohibitive, naturally forcing states toward cooperation. I also critique southern defense establishments for “threat inflation” and for executing a performative “staged Great Game”.
Additionally, across a prolific mix of theoretical essays, such as “Tribe, State, and War: Balancing the Subcomponents of World Order,” book chapters, and multi-volume book series (such as my States of Mind project in addition to my books on the Arctic), I formalize my theory of Constructive Realism as well as Fourth Image Theory. From these, I deconstruct world order into a taxonomy with three key pillars: the Organic (natural cultural/kinship foundations), the Synthetic (artificial administrative frameworks), and the Ethereal (ideational or spiritual doctrines).
Upon this structural foundation, I define the various entities that emerge when these components interact, contrasting brittle, artificially engineered regimes (ESSLEs, or Ephemeral Synthetic State-Level Entities) with cohesive, historically aligned nation-states (POSLEs). Ultimately, my work culminates in the concept of Persistent Organic Sub-State Entities (POSSEs, or Persistent Organic State-Level Entities)—a highly resilient, self-defending unit (such as an Arctic indigenous corporation or a localized tribal matrix) that fuses all three subcomponents to survive a “State of Siege” and anchor fragile national institutions from the ground up.
Volume 7 of the States of Mind project: State of Recovery.
In my 2013 book (paperback in 2014), State of Recovery: The Quest to Restore American Security After 9/11, I present a retrospective reflection of the decade following the September 11 attacks, exploring how a sustained wave of technological innovation was deployed to restore homeland security and overcome our collective “state of despair.”
State of Recovery serves as a direct sequel to my 2012 book, The Art of War in an Asymmetric World: Strategy for the Post-Cold War Era, originally known as State of Chaos. While The Art of War in an Asymmetric World focuses on how the collapse of the Cold War order birthed a fragmented world driven by tribal and asymmetric insurgencies, State of Recovery serves as the tactical and architectural response to that chaos.
It positions “recovery” not as a return to the pre-9/11 status quo, but as a technological and doctrinal evolution to restore Western homeland security against decentralized threats. The Art of War in an Asymmetric World argued that modernization and globalization have pushed non-Western, indigenous, and radical groups to weaponize asymmetrical warfare and tribal structures to destabilize the nation-state.
State of Recovery serves as the logical and sequential next step: How does a major state power heal from a massive asymmetric shock and reconstruct its security framework? Rather than focusing strictly on foreign battlefields, this book analyzes the decade-long domestic and technological mobilization within the United States to insulate and defend the homeland.
It documents how American defense shifted inward, investing heavily in innovation like biometric scanners, remote border sensors, and autonomous drone capabilities to build a preventative shield. State of Recovery was originally conceptualized as the final volume of the States of Mind series and the sequel to the updated post-Cold War volume I added to the original three-volume Visions of Order treatise after 9/11. It tracks the intellectual transition of strategic thinkers from the state of total vulnerability examined in The Art of War in an Asymmetric World (originally titled State of Chaos) back to a state of managed stability:
Expanding the Battlefield Away from the Homeland: It illustrates that a core tenet of the American recovery strategy was ensuring that future kinetic engagements would take place far from the homeland. It examines operational efforts like Operation Iraqi Freedom and counter-proliferation efforts in North Korea and Iran to show how the U.S. attempted to control asymmetric volatility abroad.
Bridging Fields: While The Art of War in an Asymmetric World focused heavily on counterinsurgency and international relations theory, State of Recovery bridges these concepts with homeland security, domestic intelligence, cyberwarfare, and the private tech sector.
Ultimately, my transition from The Art of War in an Asymmetric World to State of Recovery demonstrates my belief that surviving modern conflict requires shifting away from old Westphalian military symmetry toward a dynamic, agile, and technologically fortified state of constant resilience. The core themes and arguments of State of Recovery include:
A Technology-Driven “Recovery”
I argue that the primary way the United States filled the security vacuum left by the 9/11 attacks was through an unprecedented surge in technology spending and innovation. I chronicle how thousands of tech professionals, scientists, and policy experts collaborated to build entirely new defensive and offensive layers. Key examples include:
Defensive: The erection of new border defenses utilizing remote sensors and biometric scanners.
Offensive: The rapid deployment of autonomous air warfare capabilities, most notably the drone program.
Pushing the Battlefront Outward
A central pillar of America’s post-9/11 strategy was the conscious effort to ensure that future military engagements would take place far from the American homeland. I analyze major geopolitical shifts and interventions through this lens, examining: Operation Iraqi Freedom; the rise of Iran as a nuclear threat and North Korea’s accelerated missile program; and the development of a global ballistic missile shield designed to thwart emerging threats from the (overly conflated and much exaggerated) “Axis of Evil” before they could reach U.S. soil.
“Engineering” Security over Cyberwarfare
Unlike many contemporary security texts that focus purely on cyber warfare, State of Recovery focuses on the physical and structural engineering of homeland security. It looks at how the integration of tech across multiple disciplines created a new, algorithmic type of security.
Individual and Social Networks
Borrowing from international relations theory, I analyze the GWOT conflict from the level of the individual and the social networks in which they are embedded. I explore not only how the U.S. government leveraged network technologies to combat terrorism, but also how asymmetric, militant Islamist adversaries (like al-Qaeda) adapted and used those exact same digital and technological tools to wage war against a superpower.
State of Recovery is first and foremost a comprehensive retrospective on how the United States leveraged technological innovation to rebuild its national security apparatus in the decade following the September 11 attacks. Rather than focusing strictly on the politics of the War on Terror, it analyzes the intersection of public policy, private enterprise, and emerging technologies that transformed America’s defensive and offensive capabilities:
Technology to the Rescue: It argues that the sheer shock of 9/11 left a deep psychological and systemic vacuum in America. To pull the country out of this “state of despair,” policy makers turned heavily to technologists. The resulting massive influx of public and private capital triggered a decade of rapid innovation.
An Algorithmic Age of Defense: The book chronicles the shift toward automated, digital, and data-driven defense systems. It outlines how modern security became reliant on things like biometrics, advanced information-sharing networks, and automated infrastructure protection.
Border and Frontier Security: A significant portion of the monograph breaks down how America secured its borders. It details the deployment of remote sensors, biometric scanners, and less-lethal border solutions designed to balance security with functional infrastructure. It evaluates three distinct “fronts”: Maritime Front: securing seaports against illicit cargo or weapons of mass destruction; Southern Front: reducing border violence and high-volume illegal immigration; and Northern Front: managing the vast, open border with Canada through integrated surveillance.
Geopolitics and External Threats: Beyond non-state actors like al-Qaeda, I contextualize how these technologies were deployed against conventional state threats during the early 2010s—specifically analyzing America’s response to Iran’s emerging nuclear ambitions, North Korea’s missile acceleration, and the conceptual deployment of a ballistic missile shield.
The Asymmetric Battlefield: The book examines how both the U.S. and militant Islamist groups adapted to the digital age. I note that the internet evolved into a literal theater of war, forcing the U.S. to focus heavily on information security and tracking how terrorist entities went “virtual” to recruit and coordinate. Northern Front: Managing the vast, historically open border with Canada through integrated surveillance.
Geopolitics and External Threats: Beyond non-state actors like al-Qaeda, I contextualize how these technologies were deployed against conventional state threats during the early 2010s—specifically analyzing America’s response to Iran’s emerging nuclear ambitions, North Korea’s missile acceleration, and the conceptual deployment of a ballistic missile shield.
Conclusion
I conclude that while the combination of innovative technology and aggressive foreign policy succeeded in preventing another mass-casualty attack on the U.S. homeland for over a decade, it created a highly complex, fragmented world. Security is no longer static; it is an ongoing, evolving struggle where both states and non-state actors are trapped in a continuous loop of technological adaptation.
Ultimately, State of Recovery presents an historical mosaic of the thousands of unsung engineering and policy professionals who fundamentally redesigned how America protects itself, moving the battlefield far from the homeland while embedding security into the everyday digital fabric of the country.
It also lays the foundation for the post-GWOT era of frequent but exceedingly limited wars fought from the skies without boots on the ground, initiated during the Obama administration and in many wars perfected during the second Trump administration, which has come to experience near-constant ultra-limited warfare culminating in strategic and economic partnerships with former rivals, transforming the world order into a global business arena where war is not a continuation of policy by other means but the continuation of business by other means before defaulting to a more transactional and less kinetic relationship.
It is amidst such a climate of perpetual peace (albeit with brief armed conflicts to rebalance regional orders to better meet American interests) that we celebrate our historic 250th anniversary of America’s momentous 1776 Declaration of Independence.
Looking back 2,500 years as I have done in my States of Mind project helps to contextualize the American experience, and our experiment forging a new republic from the American wilderness, integrating the Western pillars of the realist order into separate but largely equal branches of government, so that the people, the state and the armed forces stand united against all enemies of Western value. It’s thus not naïve to imagine not only another 250 years of American liberty, but a full 2,500 more years of Western order—an order defended by American values and power.
Volume 6 of the States of Mind project: State of Chaos (published as The Art of War in an Asymmetric World).
Volume 4 of my treatise on Constructive Realism, State of Siege, spawned not just one sequel (as volume 3, State of Awe did with State of Doom), but two sequels: the first of which wasThe Art of War in an Asymmetric World: Strategy for the Post-Cold War Era (originally known as State of Chaos), which examined how the international security landscape transformed following the collapse of the Soviet Union. It chronicled how the end of predictable, bipolar Cold War dynamics did not lead to a utopian “End of History,” but rather unleashed a wave of global chaos and entropy. This volume bridges the fields of counterinsurgency (COIN), cyberwarfare, counterterrorism, and international relations theory through several core pillars:
1. Rebellion Against Modernity and Globalization
I position modern asymmetric conflicts—ranging from the 1994 Zapatista uprising in Mexico to Al Qaeda’s global jihad—not as isolated incidents, but as unified reactions against globalization, Western dominance, and forced modernization. Stripped of the stabilizing structures of the Cold War, marginalized populations and radical movements rebelled against state-centric, Western-imposed structures.
2. The Adaptation of American Power
A significant portion of the text analyzes how the United States military and intelligence communities had to radically rewrite their strategic doctrines. Designed to fight massive, conventional nation-states, the U.S. had to pivot during the Global War on Terror (GWOT) to counter decentralized networks, fluid insurgencies, and technological threats like cyberwarfare. I evaluate the theoretical and operational contributions of GWOT-era military strategists (such as Stanley McRaven and David Ronfeldt) who helped shape these new approaches.
3. The “Fourth Image”: The Tribal Foundations of Order
Expanding on Ken Waltz’s classic “three images” of international relations analysis (the individual, the state, and the international system), I introduce a Fourth Image: the tribal level. I provocatively argue that in the remote, indigenous, or poorly governed spaces where asymmetric modern wars are actually fought, state-imposed centralized control fundamentally fails.
Instead, I suggest that stable, long-term peace can only be achieved by understanding, cooperating with, and restoring traditional, bottom-up tribal order. In short: my framework shows that modern asymmetric warfare is a clash between globalizing state forces and localized tribal identities, requiring a complete rethink of classical strategic theory for a fragmented world. Rather than entering a harmonious, stable democratic era, the post-Cold War landscape unleashed fractured, non-state elements that defied classical nation-state containment.
Global Disorder: The Post-Cold War Era (Part 1)
The Collapse of Bi-Polar Stability and the Illusion of the Peace Dividend
I introduce my central thesis by challenging the prevailing neoliberal optimism of the early 1990s. The fall of the Berlin Wall prompted western theorists to predict an era dominated by market economies and democratic peace theory. I systematically dismantle this premise, demonstrating that the bipolar confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union, despite its terrifying nuclear risks, acted as a powerful stabilizing mechanism. This architecture effectively suppressed localized ethnic, tribal, and religious rivalries.
The removal of this overarching systemic pressure did not lead to international integration. Instead, it triggered a massive, systemic phenomenon that I describe as global entropy—a rapid descent into decentralized chaos, fragmentation, and structural decay within weak or artificial nation-states.
Global Entropy and Systemic Decay
In this section, I draw a sharp contrast between classical war and the security challenges of the modern era. While classical interstate competition was defined by institutional order, predictability, and formal declarations, post-Cold War entropy is characterized by its fluidity and lack of structural boundaries. I explore how the vacuum left by superpower retrenchment allowed pre-modern identities to reassert themselves. Entire regions, particularly across the Global South and the post-Soviet periphery, experienced a regression from state-level governance back to sub-state allegiances. I detail this structural decay not as an accidental byproduct of history, but as a predictable consequence of removing systemic equilibrium. The post-Cold War era is therefore defined not by international law, but by a chaotic scramble for localized survival and autonomy.
Rebellion Against Modernity, Globalization, and Western Hegemony
A core pillar of my framework is the ideological reinterpretation of asymmetric warfare. Rather than viewing modern insurgencies, radical groups, and trans-state networks merely as criminal syndicates or isolated terrorist cells, I re-conceptualize them as a unified, deep-seated rebellion against modernity and globalization.
Globalization, driven heavily by Western economic models and digital connectivity, has consistently threatened traditional, localized ways of life. I explore how asymmetric actors leverage asymmetric methods to fight back against what they perceive as an intrusive, homogenizing, and imperialistic Western framework. This resistance manifests across a wide spectrum, from the neo-Zapatista movement (EZLN) in Chiapas, Mexico, which directly opposed global trade pacts like NAFTA, to the rise of radical jihadist networks seeking to overturn Western political influence in the Middle East.
Asymmetrical Conflict and the Information Age (Part 2)
Netwar, Cyberwarfare, and the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA)
Turning my focus to the technological landscape, I analyze how the Information Age fundamentally disrupted the traditional distribution of power. During the Cold War, cutting-edge military technology required the immense industrial and financial backing of a superpower. The digital revolution completely inverted this dynamic by democratizing the tools of mass communication, intelligence gathering, and precision disruption.
I examine the concept of Netwar—a term popularized by Rand Corporation theorists David Ronfeldt and John Arquilla. Netwar describes conflicts waged by decentralized, network-centric actors who lack a formal hierarchy, clear command structure, or geographical center of gravity:
Attribute
Conventional Warfare
Information-Age Netwar
Organizational Structure
Strict military hierarchy
Decentralized, flat network cells
Primary Center of Gravity
Capital cities, industrial hubs, formal militaries
Shared ideological narrative, digital nodes
Operational Speed
Linear, dependent on supply chains
Rapid, swarm-based, digitally synchronized
Resource Requirements
Immense industrial capital and state revenue
Low-cost, commercial-off-the-shelf technology
The Democratization of Force and Non-State Multipliers
I explore the strategic implications of this technological inversion, noting that the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) inadvertently handed asymmetric adversaries devastating force-multipliers. A non-state group no longer needs an air force or an industrial base to project power across borders.
Through cyber operations, open-source intelligence collection, and low-cost digital orchestration, a tiny cell can disrupt critical infrastructure, manipulate international media cycles, and compromise the information infrastructure of a heavily armed nation-state. This digitization of conflict strips traditional powers of their conventional advantages. In the digital arena, mass and heavy armor are easily bypassed by agility, anonymity, and distributed networks.
Case Studies of Early Asymmetric Digital Actors
To ground these information-age theories, I provide detailed historical case studies:
The Zapatista Uprising (1994): I highlight the EZLN as one of the earliest pioneers of modern netwar. Recognizing they could not defeat the conventional Mexican military in a direct engagement, the Zapatistas utilized early internet networks, listservs, and international solidarity groups to wage a highly effective informational campaign. They successfully constrained the Mexican government’s military response through global public pressure.
The Evolutionary Trajectory of Al Qaeda: I next document how Al Qaeda transitioned from a localized, sanctuary-dependent organization in Afghanistan into a highly adaptive, globally distributed digital franchise. By using web forums and media manipulation, they decoupled their operations from physical geography, allowing their ideology to survive and replicate even after losing their primary territorial safe havens.
The Global War on Terror (GWOT) (Part 3)
The Strategic Shock of September 11 and Policy Misalignments
I position the September 11 attacks as the definitive, tragic confirmation of my thesis on global entropy and asymmetric threat vectors. The destruction of the World Trade Center demonstrated how a non-state actor, using minimal financial resources and commercial infrastructure, could inflict a catastrophic strategic shock on the world’s sole remaining superpower.
However, I critiques the initial Western response. I argue that the United States and its allies suffered from deep-seated institutional inertia, attempting to view and fight the early Global War on Terror through a conventional, state-centric lens. This led to a profound strategic misalignment: attempting to use heavy, industrial-era military machines to capture fluid, phantom networks.
The Doctrine of Counterinsurgency (COIN) and Operational Adaptation
As conventional interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan devolved into complex, protracted multi-sided insurgencies, the Western military apparatus was forced to undergo a radical intellectual evolution. I chart this transformation by focusing heavily on the revival and rewriting of Counterinsurgency (COIN) doctrine, spearheaded by figures like General David Petraeus and reflected in the release of Field Manual (FM) 3-24.
This pivot required moving away from conventional “kinetic” operations (killing or capturing enemies) toward population-centric warfare. I detail how the military had to transform its soldiers into nation-builders, diplomats, and cultural anthropologists. Success was no longer measured by terrain seized, but by the degree of security, economic viability, and political legitimacy provided to the local population.
The Evolution of Special Operations Forces (SOF)
Alongside population-centric COIN, I explores the massive expansion and structural elevation of Special Operations Forces (SOF) within the global security framework. I specifically highlight the theoretical and operational insights of strategists like Admiral Stanley McRaven.
McRaven’s theories on relative superiority—achieved by a small, highly integrated force using element of surprise, speed, and precision purpose—became the bedrock of modern counterterrorism. I describe how SOF units adapted to combat network-centric enemies by building their own highly integrated, inter-agency networks. This organizational evolution allowed them to shrink the time between intelligence acquisition and operational execution, creating a highly lethal tool designed to match the agility of asymmetric adversaries.
The Art of War in an Asymmetric World (Part 4)
Synthesizing Classical and Modern Strategic Theory
In this section, I deliver my primary theoretical contribution by placing modern asymmetric realities in direct conversation with classical strategic thought. I bridge the historical gap between timeless principles of conflict and the chaotic features of the 20th and 21st centuries.
I systematically revisit the foundational works of classical strategic thinkers, filtering their enduring insights through the lens of modern decentralized, non-state conflicts:
Carl von Clausewitz: I re-evaluate Clausewitz’s core concept of the remarkable trinity—the dynamic balance between the government (reason), the military (chance and strategy), and the people (passion and primal violence). In an asymmetric world where the state is no longer the sole actor, this trinity becomes fragmented. The “government” may be an amorphous tribal council, and the “military” a fluid network of insurgent cells. I argue that Clausewitz’s emphasis on the political nature of war remains true, but warns that when the political entity lacks clear borders, finding its strategic center of gravity becomes exceptionally difficult.
Antoine-Henri Jomini: Jomini’s classical focus on geometric lines of operation, concentrated mass, and territorial control is heavily challenged by me. In asymmetric netwar, there are no front lines, defined flanks, or conventional territories to capture. I argue that over-reliance on Jominian geometric principles misleads modern commanders, as the modern battlespace is human, cognitive, and digital rather than physical.
Sun Tzu: I suggest that Sun Tzu’s The Art of War is far more applicable to asymmetric environments than Western industrial-era theories. Sun Tzu’s emphasis on deception, winning without fighting through psychological subversion, avoiding strength, and attacking weakness directly mirrors the operational art of the asymmetric warrior.
The Asymmetric Paradox: When Vulnerability Becomes Strength
I introduce a counterintuitive concept known as the asymmetric paradox. In conventional warfare, a lack of heavy armor, secure logistics bases, and centralized command hierarchies is considered a fatal vulnerability. However, in asymmetric conflicts, this absolute lack of infrastructure becomes a profound strategic strength.
Because an asymmetric adversary has no permanent military bases to target, no cities to hold hostage, and no formal economy to sanction, they offer zero conventional targets to a state military. Their extreme material weakness forces them to remain fluid, hidden, and deeply embedded within the civilian population. This structure leaves conventional states with immense firepower but no clear targets against which to deploy it.
The Tribal Foundations of Order (Part 5)
Extending Realist Theory: The Application of the “Fourth Image”
The climax of my strategic analysis occurs with his critique and extension of structural realism. In international relations theory, Kenneth Waltz’s landmark framework established three images (or levels of analysis) to explain the causes of conflict and the nature of world politics:
The First Image: The Individual (human nature, psychology of leaders).
The Second Image: The State (domestic political and economic structures, democracy vs. authoritarianism).
The Third Image: The International System (anarchy, distribution of material power among nation-states).
I assert that this three-tiered framework suffers from a glaring, Eurocentric, state-biased blind spot. In the remote, fractured, and underdeveloped regions where modern asymmetric wars are actually fought, the state is an alien, artificial concept imposed by colonial history.
To correct this deficiency, I introduce the Fourth Image: the tribal level of analysis.
The Fourth Image focuses on sub-state kinship networks, clan allegiances, and traditional, localized structures of authority that have existed long before the Westphalian state system.
The Primacy of Indigenous and Tribal Sovereignty
I assert that when modern states attempt to stabilize an asymmetric battlespace by building centralized state institutions from the top down, they are fighting against the natural grain of local society. Whether in the Hindu Kush of Afghanistan, the valleys of Waziristan, or the vast expanses of the Arctic and the Amazon, local populations look to traditional kinship structures for security, justice, and resource allocation.
Top-down state-building is frequently viewed by local populations as a hostile, foreign occupation. I argue that true, durable social order in these environments cannot be achieved by imposing Western administrative institutions. Instead, it must be carefully negotiated, built, and secured from the bottom up, utilizing the organic legitimacy of traditional tribal authority.
Policy Implications for Grand Strategy and Stabilization
In the concluding chapters, I deliver a pragmatic warning to Western policymakers and military strategists. If international stabilizing efforts continue to ignore the Fourth Image, they are destined to experience perpetual strategic failure.
Grand strategy must adapt to treat tribal and indigenous structures not as obstacles to modernization, but as foundational partners in creating sustainable regional security. I call for a paradigm shift: an evolution toward an organic, decentralized approach to global order that respects, integrates, and cooperates with the tribal realities of the post-Cold War world.
As I updated and expanded my States of Mind series in the 2000s and 2010s, I found the need for a fourth, then a fifth, then a sixth, and finally a seventh volume to complete my treatise. What became volume 5 was an outgrowth of volume 3 (State of Awe), drilling in on the nuclear age which had culminated in volume three my with discussion of order in the age of total war.
While this was indeed, a single era as war industrialized and later nuclearized, achieving absoluteness in its destructiveness, I felt both the need and the desire to explore the nuance of the nuclear age, in part in homage to Waltz whose neorealism, like Brodie’s deterrence theory, sought to tame the terror of the nuclear age (and did for a little while).
Both can be thought of as nuclear realists, but as I wrote, I came to find the literature on neorealism rather light and lacking in substance, while the literature on nuclear strategy was refreshingly complex and nuanced and provided the true foundation of the nuclear order (a dangerously brittle one that collapsed like a house of cards under the unforeseen massing of Gandhian people power in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.)
My 600-page dissertation, Bernard Brodie and the Bomb: At the Birth of the Bipolar World (published in book form in 2011 by Continuum (now Bloomsbury) as the much shortened (by 300 pages!) State of Doom: Bernard Brodie, the Bomb, and the Birth of the Bipolar World), stands as a definitive professional biography and philosophical investigation of one of the 20th century’s most vital strategic minds. It explores how Bernard Brodie (1910–1978) earned his reputation as “America’s Clausewitz” or the “Clausewitz of the Nuclear Age.”
By tracing Brodie’s intellectual journey from his pre-World War II writings on naval engineering to his foundational texts on atomic deterrence and his late-career work translating Carl von Clausewitz’s classic On War, it reveals the existential dilemma of the modern era: How can a state utilize military force for political objectives when the weapons at its disposal threaten total planetary destruction? Brodie answered these questions, which were left unanswered, uncomfortably so, by Waltz’s neorealism (which left all the heavy lifting to the imagined “system,” as if a cult or new religion structured upon God’s grace and infinite wisdom.)
Introduction: The Strategic Crucible of the Bipolar World
I frame his exploration around the transition from a multipolar global system to the rigid, highly tense bipolar structure of the Cold War. In this landscape, the United States and the Soviet Union faced an unprecedented security environment defined by the “balance of terror.” At the center of this transformation was Bernard Brodie. As one of the first civilian defense intellectuals to bridge the gap between academia and military policy—most notably through his long tenure at the RAND Corporation—Brodie fundamentally redefined the purpose of military force.
My core thesis is that Brodie’s intellectual life was a lifelong project to reconcile classic military theory with technological shifts. When the splitting of the atom yielded the absolute weapon, traditional concepts of victory, total mobilization, and kinetic warfare were shattered. Throughout his career, Brodie fought to bring politics back into command of military strategy, preventing the machine of war from triggering a global apocalypse.
Before the Bomb: Sea Power and Technological Determinism
Before becoming the premier architect of nuclear strategy, Brodie was a scholar of naval history and sea power. I emphasize that understanding Brodie’s early work is essential, as it established his analytical framework for evaluating how technological paradigm shifts alter strategic realities.
Sea Power in the Machine Age (1941)
Brodie’s first major academic contribution analyzed the profound transition of naval warfare during the industrial revolution. He tracked four great technological revolutions that fundamentally altered naval architecture and strategy:
The transition from sail to steam propulsion.
The replacement of wooden hulls with iron and steel armor plating.
The evolution from solid shot to explosive shells and rifled ordnance.
The introduction of submarine warfare and the torpedo.
Brodie observed that military establishments are historically slow to grasp the true strategic implications of new inventions. Tacticians often attempt to force revolutionary technologies into outdated operational doctrines. I highlight this as Brodie’s first encounter with technological determinism—the idea that technology drives changes in human history and warfare, requiring an equal revolution in strategic thought to prevent catastrophe.
A Layman’s Guide to Naval Strategy (1942)
Published right after the attack on Pearl Harbor, this book established Brodie as a clear-eyed strategic communicator. It arrived at a moment when many critics believed the airplane had rendered the surface fleet obsolete.
Brodie took a nuanced, balanced view. He argued that while air power changed the tactics of naval engagement, it did not change the fundamental strategic purpose of sea power: the control of maritime lines of communication. This early insight previewed his nuclear-era philosophy—technological leaps change the means and costs of warfare, but they do not automatically erase basic geopolitical realities.
The Absolute Weapon: The Invention of Nuclear Deterrence
The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 completely upended Brodie’s strategic worldview. Within months of these events, Brodie edited and co-authored a foundational text, The Absolute Weapon: Atomic Power and World Order (1946). It was in this work that modern nuclear deterrence theory was born.
The Inversion of Military Utility
I analyze this iconic quote to illustrate how profoundly Brodie broke from traditional military tradition. For centuries, military strategy focused on securing victory through the destruction of the enemy’s armed forces.
Brodie recognized that the atomic bomb rendered total war obsolete as an instrument of statecraft. Because an atomic exchange could destroy entire civilizations in a matter of hours, a war fought with such weapons could yield no rational political benefit. Therefore, the military’s primary job shifted from war-fighting to war-averting.
The Pillars of Early Deterrence Theory
In The Absolute Weapon, Brodie laid out the core principles that would govern U.S. and Soviet interactions for the next four decades:
The Futility of Defense: Brodie argued that there was no foreseeable, reliable defense against an atomic attack. Even if a defensive system intercepted 90% of incoming bombers, the remaining 10% would still deliver unacceptable, civilizational ruin.
The Primacy of Retaliation: Since defense was impossible, security could only be achieved through the guaranteed threat of overwhelming retaliation. A potential aggressor must understand that attacking would trigger their own destruction.
The Irrelevance of Superiority: Once a state possesses enough nuclear weapons to destroy its opponent’s society, acquiring thousands more offers little strategic advantage. Nuclear utility hits a point of saturation.
Preserving Order in the Age of Apocalyptic War
As the 1940s turned into the 1950s, the strategic landscape grew vastly more complex and dangerous. I detail how Brodie’s early, clean models of deterrence were severely tested by fast-moving historical developments.
The Loss of the American Monopoly (1949)
When the Soviet Union detonated its first atomic bomb in August 1949, the United States lost its nuclear monopoly much faster than Washington political elites had predicted. This shift created a symmetric balance of terror, giving rise to the truly bipolar world.
Brodie had to adapt his theories to a world where both sides could instantly retaliate. This eliminated any lingering illusions that the atomic bomb could be used as an offensive tool of diplomatic coercion without risking domestic annihilation.
The Thermonuclear Revolution
The strategic equation changed again with the development of the Hydrogen Bomb (the thermonuclear weapon), first tested by the United States in 1952 and the Soviet Union in 1953.
While the atomic bomb measured its yield in kilotons (thousands of tons of TNT equivalent), the thermonuclear bomb measured its yield in megatons (millions of tons of TNT). Fission bombs were city-killers; fusion bombs were region-killers, capable of poisoning massive geographic areas with lethal radioactive fallout.
I point out that while some defense intellectuals, like those in the Air Force, viewed the H-bomb as just a larger explosive tool for strategic air power, Brodie saw it as a qualitative leap into absolute absurdity. The H-bomb removed any remaining doubt about his 1946 thesis: total war with thermonuclear weapons was absolute suicide.
Rethinking the Unthinkable: Escalation and Limited War
With total war off the table as a rational choice, Brodie turned his focus to preventing brushfire conflicts from escalating into all-out thermonuclear exchanges. My analysis of this period highlights Brodie’s tenure at the RAND Corporation, where he interacted and frequently sparred with other giants of nuclear strategy, such as Herman Kahn, Albert Wohlstetter, and Henry Kissinger.
The Problem of Massive Retaliation
During the Eisenhower administration, U.S. defense policy relied heavily on the doctrine of Massive Retaliation. This policy declared that the U.S. would respond to any communist aggression globally—even local, conventional incursions—using overwhelming nuclear forces at times and places of its own choosing.
Brodie emerged as a sharp critic of Massive Retaliation. He argued that the threat lacked credibility in an era of nuclear parity. If the Soviet Union launched a localized conventional attack in Europe or Asia, would an American president truly risk the destruction of New York and Washington to defend a distant border?
Brodie asserted that a non-credible threat fails to deter. If the enemy exposes the bluff, the U.S. would face a terrible choice: launch a suicidal nuclear war or suffer an embarrassing geopolitical retreat.
The Architecture of Limited War
To solve this credibility gap, Brodie helped develop the theory of Limited War, which he detailed in his 1959 masterpiece, Strategy in the Missile Age.
Brodie argued that to make deterrence function at lower levels of conflict, the United States had to develop the capability and political will to fight limited wars using restricted means and targeting limited objectives.
Limitation of Means: Intentionally holding back maximum military power—such as avoiding the use of tactical nuclear weapons—to signaling a desire to avoid total war.
Limitation of Objectives: Fighting not for the unconditional surrender of the enemy or the total overthrow of their regime, but for specific geopolitical corrections (e.g., restoring a pre-war border).
I highlight the deep irony Brodie wrestled with: to prevent an absolute war, a superpower must become proficient at fighting restrained, sometimes frustratingly inconclusive limited wars.
A Clausewitz for America: Reuniting War and Politics
The final chapters of my book dive into the philosophical culmination of Brodie’s career: his deep engagement with the writings of Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz:
The Clausewitzian Renaissance
In the late 1960s and 1970s, disillusioned by the strategic failures of the Vietnam War, Brodie dedicated himself to a deep reassessment of classical strategic philosophy. He collaborated with historian Peter Paret to produce the landmark 1976 Princeton University Press translation of Clausewitz’s On War, providing an extensive commentary that contextualized the Prussian master for the nuclear age.
Brodie discovered that Clausewitz provided the perfect philosophical toolkit to fight the technocratic, math-heavy trends that had taken over American defense planning. Strategists like Robert McNamara had tried to turn war into a bureaucratic exercise of systems analysis, body counts, and raw cost-benefit equations. Brodie used Clausewitz to remind the world that war is inherently an unpredictable, messy, human phenomenon driven by emotion, chance, and politics.
Reconciling the Famous Dictum
The core of Clausewitzian theory rests on the famous dictum: “War is the continuation of politics by other means.” This means that military violence must always serve as a tool for a specific political objective, and the political goal must entirely dictate the scale of military effort.
I carefully map out how Brodie solved the paradox of applying this 19th-century rule to the thermonuclear era:
The Separation Point: In an all-out nuclear war, the sheer scale of destruction breaks the connection between violence and statecraft. Because no political goal can justify the total annihilation of one’s own society, total thermonuclear war cannot be a continuation of politics. It is simply madness.
The Solution: Therefore, the only way to keep war Clausewitzian in the modern era is through nuclear deterrence and strict limitation. Deterrence uses the threat of force to achieve the political objective of stability and peace. When kinetic conflict does break out, it must be kept strictly limited so that the costs of fighting never outgrow the political value of the goal.
By aligning deterrence with Clausewitz, Brodie elevated it from a temporary military fix to a permanent, morally grounded framework for preserving global order.
The Lingering Legacy of the (Brief) Bipolar Peace
In my analysis, it becomes clear that Bernard Brodie’s contributions were central to preventing the Cold War from turning hot. The stable bipolar order was not an accidental byproduct of technology; it was a constructed intellectual architecture designed by thinkers who walked the world back from the brink of doom.
Brodie’s evolution reflects the journey of an era:
Technology and War: He began by studying how technology changes the machinery of war (Sea Power in the Machine Age, and Guide to Naval Strategy).
The Bomb and Obsolescence of Total War: He recognized when technology had made total war obsolete (The Absolute Weapon).
Escalation: He built the operational guardrails of escalation management (Strategy in the Missile Age and Escalation and the Nuclear Option).
He grounded the entire system in the timeless truth that military power must always serve political ends (“Guide to Reading On War“ and War and Politics).
I conclude that while the modern international system has continued its shift away from the bipolarity of the Cold War into a complex, multipolar landscape featuring asymmetric threats and nuclear proliferation, Brodie’s insights remain essential. The challenge of the 21st century mirrors that of 1946: ensuring that human political wisdom stays in control of our terrifying capacity for technological destruction.
In my four-volume The Realist Tradition in International Relations: The Foundations of Western Order, I unpack 2,500+ years of strategic history. To me, “constructive realism” is not a tragic acceptance of endless war, but a tool of heroic idealism—a systematic, philosophical effort by key thinkers across millennia to use power, strategy, and statecraft to actively craft order out of chaos.
My framework is fundamentally the conceptualization, explication and defense of Constructive Realism. By focusing on these states of mind, I attempt to revive the first Waltzian image (the psychological, human, and sub-state level of analysis). I argue that international order is not just an accident of systemic architecture, but a conscious, evolving philosophical product constructed by human actors responding to the changing nature of violence. I structure my exploration chronologically through four distinct eras, using an historic roster of foundational thinkers, military leaders, and strategists to illustrate this concept.
Volume 1: The Classical Foundations (State of Hope)
In the ancient world, where systemic chaos reigned supreme, thinkers laid down the cognitive and linguistic tools needed to conceptualize international order.
Thucydides: The ancient Greek historian who chronicled the Peloponnesian War. I treat him not as a pessimist who famously declared that “the strong do what they can,” but as a constructive pioneer who first mapped out the objective mechanics of the security dilemma, allowing future societies to consciously design balances of power.
Socrates & Plato: I highlight the philosophical pivot toward defining justice, structural stability, and the idea of the “Philosopher King.” Plato epitomizes the constructive realist effort to intellectualize governance, arguing that true political order requires aligning supreme power with supreme wisdom.
Aristotle: The father of empirical political science. I also view Aristotle as a pioneering constructive realist who analyzed the anatomy of various state constitutions to determine how practical, balanced, and stable governance could survive internal and external shocks.
Volume 2: The Rise of the Modern State (State of Fear)
Confronting the brutal collapses of regional orders, early-modern theorists sought to build an unshakeable sovereign foundation to protect humanity from its own destructive nature.
Niccolò Machiavelli: The Florentine diplomat famous for The Prince. I look past the caricature of Machiavellian ruthlessness to reframe him as a visionary of sovereign creation. Machiavelli’s dream was the journey from a fractured prince’s rule to a stable, enduring republic capable of defending its people through civic virtue and martial readiness.
Thomas Hobbes: Dubbed by me as the “Ultimate Constructive Realist.” Hobbes famously described life in the anarchic state of nature as “nasty, brutish, and short” (somewhat like life on the “Island” during the final season of Lost). I note that Hobbes’ response was a masterpiece of constructive statecraft: inventing the Leviathan (the modern state), which trades total individual freedom for collective security under a centralized authority.
Frederick the Great: The Prussian king who embodied the transition from theory to practice. I chronicle Frederick’s journey from writing his idealistic critique of Machiavelli (Anti-Machiavel) to ruling as a pragmatic “Philosopher King” who used a highly disciplined military apparatus to stabilize Central European geopolitics.
Napoleon Bonaparte: The ultimate catalyst of total war. I view Napoleon’s legacy as the structural shockwave that forced the European continent to graduate from limited Westphalian warfare into industrialized, nationalized conflict, testing the limits of state-built order. Theorists of modern war, Carl.von Clausewitz and Antoine-Henri Jomini serve as the intellectual bridge at the end of Volume 2, dueling over how to impose order onto the chaotic explosion of the Napoleonic Wars.
Antoine-Henri Jomini: The Swiss officer and military theorist who sought to reduce the chaotic genius of Napoleon into a reliable, scientific manual. I frame Jomini as an early champion of a highly structured, geometric approach to strategy. To Jomini, war could be mastered through immutable principles—lines of operation, concentration of force, and geometric symmetry. He modernizes constructive realism by codifying these precise rules, so that states could make warfare a predictable, manageable instrument of national policy.
Carl von Clausewitz: The Prussian general and philosopher of war whose masterwork, On War, serves as the ultimate counterweight to Jomini. Rather than trying to iron out chaos with geometry, Clausewitz embraced it. He introduced concepts like “friction” (the unexpected things that go wrong in war) and the “fog of war.” I position Clausewitz as a cornerstone of modern constructive realism because he fundamentally reconnects violence back to human order, famously declaring that “war is the continuation of politics by other means.” By subordinating raw military destruction to rational political objectives, Clausewitz provided the conceptual guardrails to prevent war from consuming civilization in the age of total war.
Volume 3: The Nuclear Era and Neorealism (State of Awe)
The advent of the atomic bomb forced 20th-century strategic minds to completely redefine the relationship between state survival and total destruction.
Bernard Brodie: Known as “America’s Clausewitz,” Brodie was one of the first to grasp the reality of the nuclear age. I examine how Brodie brilliantly adapted classical military theory to the absolute weapon, asserting that the primary purpose of the military had fundamentally changed: it was no longer to win wars, but to avert them through deterrence. (My chapter on Brodie in State of Awe later evolved into a separate volume entirely in my States of Mind treatise, becoming State of Doom.)
Herman Kahn: The legendary (and provocative) nuclear strategist who wrote On Thermonuclear War. I note Kahn took a “Jominian” (highly calculated, geometric, and systematic) approach to strategic thinking. By boldly “thinking about the unthinkable,” Kahn constructively mapped out scenarios to ensure that even if deterrence failed, escalation could be controlled and civilization could survive (albeit with much denial on the lingering consequences of nuclear fallout and radiation).
Kenneth Waltz: The father of structural realism (neorealism), a critique of which began my own realist journey as I sought to reinvigorate the First Image (the individual), and de-emphasize the Third (system level). I focus on Waltz and his peers as the “wizards of automation.” Waltz shifted the lens away from human psychology to system architecture, illustrating how the bipolar structure of the Cold War created an equilibrium that mechanically preserved global stability (until it didn’t!)
Volume 4: The Age of Peoples’ War & Insurgency (State of Siege)
In the contemporary era, the traditional state’s monopoly on violence is challenged by asymmetric, decentralized, and non-Western movements. I highlight that these architects of upheaval are often visionaries constructing alternative political models and sovereign structures.
Sun Tzu: The ancient Chinese strategist whose philosophy anchors modern asymmetric conflict. I utilize Sun Tzu to show how strategic order can be achieved by prioritizing deception, subversion, and psychological manipulation over costly, direct state-on-state clashes.
Mao Zedong: The architect of modern insurgent warfare. I analyze Mao’s theory of “People’s War,” framing him as a constructive theorist who successfully weaponized marginalized, agrarian populations to overthrow an established political order and forge an alternative state model.
Mahatma Gandhi: Pioneering theorist of “People Power.” I explain how Gandhi’s nonviolent resistance (and Gene Sharp’s structural/theoretical interpretation of Gandhi) framework for civilian-based defense are highly strategic, calculated exercises of power designed to dismantle oppressive regimes without the traditional tools of kinetic war.
Osama bin Laden: The infamous mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks. I analyze bin Laden through a dark realist lens—not as a nefarious, chaos-inducing terrorist, but as a sub-state strategic actor attempting to challenge the global Westphalian model and build an alternative transnational, faith-based political order through militant jihadism.
Celebrating America’s 250th anniversary since its momentous Declaration of Independence certainly makes a quarter millennium feel like the blink of an eye. Especially after the triumph of people power brought President Trump back into office in a sweeping indictment of the deep state and its subversion of American values and constitutional principles.
Ultimately, the American experience has been an experiment in achieving a realist vision of the world, and crafting a modern republic built upon the same balanced “trinity of power” (a liberating alignment of the people, the state and the armed forces) that has empowered the Western order since the days of Socrates, Plato and Xenophon.
But to fully grok the universal significance of the American experiment, we must look back not just 250 years, but much farther — to the start of the Western experiment 2,500 years ago!
And it just so happens that I have penned just such a retrospective analysis, originally (before the Cold War ended) called Visions of Order, a three-volume work (Volume 1: State of Hope; Volume 2: State of Fear; and Volume 3: State of Awe); and later, States of Mind, an expanded four-volume work with the added volume, State of Siege, which soon again expanded to include a fifth, sixth and seventh volume, State of Chaos, State of Doom and State of Recovery.
My original three-volume treatise (Visions of Order) concluded, in State of Awe, with the bipolar Cold War peace, and was penned in the mid-to-late 1980s, coming to completion just as Cold War ended, collapsing the seemingly millennial era of bipolarity (like all such millennial dreams of everlasting order), and with the swiftness of that collapse, unmasking neorealism and most other Cold War IR theories (with notable exceptions like Regime Theory) as brittle ideological dogmas masquerading as theories.
Visions of Order was going to be my dissertation, a rebuttal of Ken Waltz’s neorealism written under Waltz’s apoplectic supervision (he hated it, but at the same time, loved it, but mostly hated it!) His other students were unwilling to stand up to him, and he loved a good debate (as Scott Sagan came to appreciate with their post- Cold War debate on nuclear proliferation). But when the Cold War ended, imploding the now obsolete field of Soviet and East European Studies, and unmasking a whole generation of IR theorists as delusional navel-gazers and Waltzian butt-kissers, I proposed a new subfield in Circumpolar Studies to replace the now-obsolete field of Soviet and East European Studies (itself a fiction of Russian imperialist fantasy), but was laughed at by the pompous defenders of obsolete subfields.
Rather than kick a dead horse, I hopped on my 250cc Honda Rebel motorbike and road up the Alaska Highway to Whitehorse, and from their up the Klondike Highway to Dawson, and from there up the Dempster Highway to Inuvik on the Mackenzie River Delta near the Beaufort Sea Coast, where over the next decade I penned another three-volume treatise on the foundations of international relations, based upon my observations and experiences in the Western Arctic (and which is discussed in the companion to this retrospective theoretical memoir, “My Arctic Journey.”)
Two decades later, as the dust and debris of 9/11 was settling, I pulled out my handwritten draft of my completed, three-volume Visions of Order on spiral bound notebooks, and hired a wonderful typist on Craigslist to digitize the manuscript for me for the Internet era, with the idea of adding new volumes to bring what I was now calling States of Mind up to date (as both tribute to, and defiant mockery of, the nonsensical, and overly ideological, Constructivist school that has colonized the hive mind of academia after neorealism became obsolete with the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall to people power.)
As my updated expanded treatise approached completion, I decided it was time to publish it. Waltz was still alive, and still beating the dead horse of neorealism, even arguing in The New York Times that an Iranian bomb would be good for world peace. Though too late to become a dissertation under his supervision, he did enthusiastically agree to serve as an external reader, but unfortunately passed away before the public defense, owing to an overly eager junior faculty member insisting on yet another revision to bring the work current with the literature, since I wrote the first draft just before the end of the Cold War, resulting in a year delay that we simply did not have as Waltz’s precarious health deteriorated.
With Waltz no longer with us, I refocused my attention on State of Awe, in tribute to Waltz, and wrote the expanded State of Doom which further evolved into a strategic biography of Bernard Brodie, a contemporary of Waltz’s who did for deterrence and strategic theory what Waltz did for IR theory: wedded it to the existential nuclear challenge of the post-Hiroshima world.
States of Mind further evolved into what ultimately became a seven-volume treatise and I ended up dividing the work in two to ensure the entire work could be published. Praeger Security International agreed to publish the original Visions of Order with the addition of the post-9/11 State of Siege, while Continuum Books agreed to publish State of Doom, State of Chaos, and State of Recovery.
Thus, in 2011, my four-volume, twenty-five century chronicle of realism across the ages (The Realist Tradition in International Relations: The Foundations of Western Order) came to press—the first part of my seven-volume States of Mind project. In it, I present a sweeping and provocative (if I do say so myself!) reinterpretation of realist theory.
Challenging the systems-centric neorealist tradition of structural realism as articulated by Waltz—one of the two most stubborn mentors I’ve ever had, the other being Gene Sharp, another realist thinker of Waltz’s generation who was as unyielding on strategic nonviolence as Waltz was on systemic structure—I frame the evolution of realist thought through the eyes of two-and-a-half millennia of individual realist thinkers and their respective quests to tame the chaos of their times, from the era of city-states and classical empires to global nuclear superpowers, yielding an evolving but strikingly consistent philosophical and theoretical tradition.
I conclude that the foundations of world order are built upon these evolving “states of mind” that correspond to distinct historical eras and their respective technologies, strategies and paradigms of warfare. I organized this framework into four distinct “states of mind,” each examined in its own volume, capturing how political leaders, philosophers, and strategists responded to, and yearned to transcend, the chaos of their times.
Volume 1: State of Hope: Order in the Age of Classical War
The Era: Classical Antiquity (tracing back to Thucydides and ancient Greece).
The Concept: This state of mind emerges from a baseline of supreme geopolitical chaos. It is a “state of hope” because it represents humanity’s earliest philosophical efforts to conceptualize, predict, and ultimately tame international anarchy. Rather than accepting perpetual vulnerability, classical realism sought the intellectual foundations necessary to construct a predictable, sustainable balance of power out of raw conflict.
Volume 2: State of Fear: Order in the Age of Limited War
The Era: The early-modern period through the Enlightenment (and the rise of the Westphalian states system).
The Concept: Driven by a collective psychological dread of endless religious and civil bloodbaths (such as the Thirty Years’ War), this state of mind prioritized survival and stability above all else. This collective “fear” directly catalyzed the birth of the modern sovereign nation-state. By monopolizing violence and establishing strict borders, states constrained the scope of conflict, transitioning the world into an era of structured, “limited” warfare governed by clear diplomatic rules.
Volume 3: State of Awe: Order in the Age of Total War
The Era: The 20th century through the Cold War (both World Wars and the nuclear age).
The Concept: The rise of absolute industrialized warfare and the advent of the atomic bomb shifted humanity into a state of psychological “awe”—a paralyzing realization of our capacity for total self-destruction. Realist strategy during this period evolved to manage unprecedented systemic danger. It gave rise to the philosophy of nuclear deterrence and strategic stability, where order was paradoxically maintained through the terrifying equilibrium of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD).
Volume 4: State of Siege: Order in the Age of Insurgency
The Era: The post-Cold War and post-9/11 contemporary world.
The Concept: This modern state of mind reflects the fragmentation of the traditional nation-state’s monopoly on security. As globalized networks, tribal factions, and asymmetric actors rose up against Western modernization, states found themselves in a perpetual “state of siege” from within and below. This era shifts the realist focus away from massive, state-on-state clashes toward navigating non-state insurgencies, counter-terrorism, and localized border friction.
Byzantium. The surprising life of a medieval empire – by Judith Herrin
In the economy chapter, apart from the often overlooked hard-ass (gold) and long-ass (700 years) of monetary stability, the author discusses some social aspects of economic life. The Byzantine elites, following on Ancient Rome’s disdain for commercial endeavors, typically opted to invest in three things: Land, administrative offices (which could confer some coin in unofficial ways), and titles in the Court.
A Byzantine celebration, as copilot imagined it. In the other versions, people were so hardcore eastern orthodox christians that even had halos.
The Court titles had fancy names and came with regular allowances. The more mundane ones had a rate of return of 2.5%- 3.0%, while the higher-ups (like Protospatharios, loosely meaning First Sword Bearer, with responsibilities that oscillated among Chief Bodyguard, Receptionist and Master of Ceremonies) reached 8.3%. Since Byzantines had also inherited Rome’s practise of capping interest rates, we know that a simple citizen could lend at a rate of 6.0% (a banker at 8.0% and a distinguised person like a Senator at 4.0%).
Re: Byzantine interest rates, from the impressive but rather dry, A History of Interest Rates – by Sidney Homer & Richard Sylla
So, it mostly did not make sense to buy a Court title, money-wise. Unless you did manage to land as the Protospatharios, so you could enter a risk-free carry trade of 2.3% and also enjoy lovely red robes with gold lining or white robes and a golden mantle (the latter attire was reserved for eunuchs). Half-joking aside, the titles were not transferable (that is, no secondary market), so you could not probably even get back the initial investment. It turns out, fancy names / clothes/ duties/ company were a major factor, after all. And secondary markets serve a purpose, at least sometimes.
Much of our life is governed neither by the government’s laws or by solely individual fancies, but by following or resisting or riding spontaneous orders.
The speech also references Harrison Bergeron, the short story by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (published in 1961), which NOL treated few years ago. I have to admit, I only knew the author’s name and no more. The opening is quite something:
THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren’t only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.
This absurd world drips vitriol, though the target is debatable: Most see a parody of socialistic/ communistic principles, though others think that the irony was intended to the (Cold War) US perception of those principles. Also: What’s this thing with dystopias and April?
Vonnegut is the second-in-a-row author from that era that I added to my list, after the recent discovery of Frederik Pohl (just acquired The Space Merchants, written with Cyril M. Kornbluth, in a decadent 90s Greek version).
(H/T to Cafe Hayek for the McCloskey link, and Skyclad for the title word play).
In brief, I argue that the increasing pressure on academics to publish has led to a decrease in the accuracy of academic work, and suggest ways to rectify this.
I begin Markets with Limits by outlining how Jason Brennan and Peter Jaworski (both of Georgetown University) have inadvertently misrepresented the views of the “anti-commodification theorists” they criticize in their influential book Markets Without Limits.
I then expand my discussion to identify “woozles” (claims that are widely repeated but false) in other disciplines–such as the claim that Eskimos have many different words for snow, that Victorian physicians “cured” their female patients of hysteria by using vibrators, and that Popeye ate spinach because it had high levels of Vitamin D. (This part of the book was a lot of fun to write!)
Along the way I also provide a taxonomy of different types of expressivist arguments, of which semiotic arguments are only one, and a taxonomy of the different ways in which one might understand the debate over the moral limits of markets. And I insert Easter Eggs–hidden academic jokes–throughout the text, Index, and Bibliography!
The link to his new book is here. Check it out! And check out his excellent essays on colonialism here.
There’s a new book coming out that y’all should read: Development with Dignity: Self-determination, Localization, and the End to Poverty. Here’s the link. Here’s the description:
At a time when the global development industry is under more pressure than ever before, this book argues that an end to poverty can only be achieved by prioritizing human dignity.
Unable to adequately account for the roles of culture, context, and local institutions, today’s outsider-led development interventions continue to leave a trail of unintended consequences, ranging from wasteful to even harmful. This book shows that increased prosperity can only be achieved when people are valued as self-governing agents. Social orders that recognize autonomy and human dignity unleash enormous productive energy. This in turn leads to the mobilization of knowledge-sharing that is critical to innovation and localized problem-solving. Offering a wide range of interdisciplinary perspectives and specific examples from the field showing these ideas in action, this book provides NGOs, multilateral institutions, and donor countries with practical guidelines for implementing “dignity-first” development.
Compelling and engaging, with a wide range of recommendations for reforming development practice and supporting liberal democracy, this book will be an essential read for students and practitioners of international development.
It’s by Tom Palmer (one of my favorite scholars) and Matt Warner. Again the link is here.
A novella fucked me up. Not now. That would be some 20 years ago, at the nationally held university admission exams. So, last week I went for a complete re-read of the thing, “Η Τιμή και το Χρήμα” (translates in either Price or Honor, and Money, a witty ambiguity in Greek) by Konstantinos Theotokis. It follows a family drama in Corfu island, circa 1910. It’s prose is something for its own sake, but more importantly, it is a relatively rare depiction of lower class people, not as proud, hard-working laborers, but as quite cold calculating individuals.
Rigid constraints are in place, from tradition and custom: Social hierarchy is alive and kicking, with old noble families and new-moneyed ones on top and the poorer, working ones beneath. Women are generally subordinate. There is a clear distinction in occupations, so that men of higher heritage are unavoidably expected to be masters, not employees, securing that their women do not (need to) work. The drama arises as the son (Andreas) of such a family, plighted by ill economic tidings, and the daughter (Rini) of a lower family, fall in love. It gets more complicated as the girl’s mother (Epistimi), the acting head of their house and a business partner of sorts to the prospective groom, refuses to offer the requested dowry.
It is a sad story, with just a bit of silver lining so no to come as downright depressing. Some take-aways:
Smuggling was thriving. Andreas smuggles commodities and cattle.
Epistimi, a factory seamstress, buys smuggled products from Andreas to resell them, and also lends him money for his endeavors. A homebrew little merchant – money lender she is.
The interest rate is around 20%-25% for a term of weeks or so. In written pact.
Smuggling operations have a nearly explicit political coverage. Andreas uses his family’s connections to remove the local constable at some point.
This patronage is flimsy, as governments change. Smuggling shifts to the new minister’s electoral district. Hardly a good fit for trade theorizing.
Per Andreas’ uncle, who is also his accomplice, smuggling is as decent as any dealing, and those “fat cats” at the capital could do with less taxes.
Women’s’ social position plainly sucked. But at least they could take some initiatives.
Hard labor is in fact praised throughout the novella.
Juveniles lack context to understand and appreciate the novella, I think. I agree it should be taught, but not in the hammer-it-in-your-head way it was presented back then.
The Alloy of Law, a sequel that became the 1st part of another Mistborn trilogy. Gritty steampunk setting, the mix & match of magic powers didn’t do it for me. Meh. (Brandon Sanderson)
Reckoners trilogy – Almost fine for YA. Forgettable. (Brandon Sanderson)
Earthsea Quartet – Rich and beautiful, seems a bit dated or familiar, since it set standards encountered in later works in the genre. (Ursula Le Guin)
Farseer trilogy – Intricate world building, the 1st person POV suits. Curiously, the 2nd book is the best of the series. (Robin Hobb)
Prose-wise, Le Guin and Hobb lead by a wide margin vs Sanderson. The two also go beyond the usual hack-n-slash and shed light to the more mundane labors of daily life in a largely medieval world. A documentary on castles/ forests/ ports could certainly use a few of Hobb’s descriptions and terms.
The Lacquer Screen – A detective novel set in Imperial China, of a particular subgenre called gong’an. I enjoyed the ambience of Tang period, while the whole read is quite old-fashioned. (Robert van Gulik)
Comic Books
Watchmen – Superb. (Moore/ Gibbons)
Batman: The Dark Knight Returns – I expected to like it more, I think. (Miller)
Blacksad (#1-5, integrated version) – Sublime artwork, storylines good but uneven. I had already read #1-3 some 15 years ago. (Canales/ Guarnido)
On the pile
The dispossessed (Ursula Le Guin)
Watership Down (Richard Adams)
Ship of Magic (Robin Hobb)
Superman: Red Son (Millar/ Johnson/ Robinson/ Wong/ Plunkett)
The Code is dead, to begin with. Watchmen (DC) is awesome, a near-Orwell experience. On comics historical curios and intellectual drifts. Here goes.
Vol. 1 – That other 50s scare and all
Somewhere somehow I picked up the Comics Code Authority story. It goes like this: The rise of mass-media in early 50s saw a creeping moral panic against the more “graphic” content of comic books (think horror, violence and the like). In 1954, the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency investigated the supposedly detrimental influence of comic books, taking into account speculative, biased evidence. The emerging threat of government regulation prompted the creation of the Code by the comic publishers, so that they could check content themselves. The self-censoring initiative could use some tuning: It was overly strict, shaking-up and aggressively downsizing the industry. Thus, a government “nudge” led to a private sector (over)reaction, with ill effects. The sector, however, adapted and continued, underground or otherwise.
Ironically, it was another government nod that galvanized a Code overhaul in 1971, as the Nixon administration asked Stan Lee of Marvel to incorporate an anti-drugs storyline in Amazing Spiderman. The arc proceeded without CCA approval in mid-1971 (funnily, just before the international monetary system entered turmoil). And it was in 1973 (say hello to the first oil crisis) that the depiction of murder in a popular comic book (Amazing Spiderman, again) marked the passage from the campy superheroes of the Silver Age (c. 1956 – 1970) to a more diverse and socially attuned bunch in the Bronze Age (c. 1970 – 1985). As the disillusionment of the 70s gave its place to cynicism in the 80s, so did the comic heroes matured, with works like Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns. The archetypes formed in the period (Dark Age, typically 1985-1996), grim and complex, redefined the genre and are still here today.
The Code was updated again in 1989, but failed to stay relevant in the face of increasing bypassing/ sidelining via new distribution methods (all hail the market in action). Just 20 years ago, Marvel abandoned it. 10 years later, in 2011, the last adherents, DC and Archie, finally desisted, too.
Vol. 2 – Randian Quests & Answers
Α couple of (relatively) fresh articles flashed from The Comics Journal:
Not an exactly nuanced analysis, the second one (it contains a fewusefullinks though), but still, both presented things to consider. As it turns out, the co-creator (along with aforementioned Stan Lee) of f – Spiderman, Steve Ditko, endorsed objectivist ideals in early 60s (he even contributed a piece to Reason back in 1969). Here is another scholarly short paper on his impact:
If mid-60s Peter Parker, “[c]old, arrogant, detached from the lives of others, but driven to follow his purpose and pursue higher ends”, seems objectivist enough, then the Question and Mr. A., Ditko’s creations in late 60s, are the real thing. These two were featured in smaller publications, and later provided the inspiration for Rorschach (Watchmen).
The character was intended not only as a tribute to Ditko, but also as a stark criticism for randian convictions, meant to make a bad example of them. However, the controversial fictional zealot resonated (a bit too well perhaps) with the audience. Indeed, the character delivers some of the most memorable quotes ever, his unflinching crusade against the morally bankrupt (political class included) is iconic, and his damaged humanity invites some sympathy.
Depending on priors and inclinations, one can certainly discern smatterings of Rand’s ideas in Rorschach (“no gray”, believing in “a day’s work for a day’s pay”, among others). But I think that his trope could be assigned to other venues, too. For example, a fantasy aficionado will see a Paladin gone (very) wrong, maybe, or a casual will stick to the apparent right-wing leanings per se, and so on.
The other route of Rand influence is traced to Frank Miller and his Dark Knight take on Batman. The arc of a lone (capitalist) hero versus media-induced apathy and the corrupted establishment (and said establishment’s lapdog, Superman) has a libertarian facet, yes. I will get it (next week probably), read it and, then, return.
In law school, I found that the central goal of legal academics and practitioners was to construct systems of thought, regulation, and courts providing justice. In that endeavor, my peers and professors constantly asked, “what is justice?”
I think well intentioned lawyers would agree, the law should provide access to justice via a system that is generally agreeable to those subjected to it, and that matches in rules what the general public aligns on in spirit. However, beyond these generalities, I find the conversation of ‘what is justice’ to be too abstract to be useful. However, that does not mean we should give up on it, we just need to change approaches, and instead ask ‘what is injustice?’
The Via Negativa
The basis for this is that it is easier to agree on what is unjust than on what is just: injustice in the form of concrete, tangible wrongdoing can be protested to, and people from diverse viewpoints can find agreement in what they mutually despise. Through the via negativa, then, we can fill in the negative space around justice, and by recognizing what it is NOT, we can start to give it form.
I know exactly where I would start, since I spend way too much time around lawyers, and I have noticed that they are open to any discussion of how lawyers can bring justice, but get very prickly if you suggest that the cost in time, money, and lost control by delegating justice to lawyers is in any way problematic. Let’s just say, lawyers don’t like being reminded that they are rent seekers in the process of achieving justice. So, my bold assertion is:
Transaction Costs are Injustice
Let me unpack this. What I mean by this is that, whatever a just outcome may be, it is unjust to delay this outcome when speed is possible, it is unjust to have complexity and opacity when simplicity is possible, and it is unjust to demand control when voluntarism and mutuality is possible. In effect, it is unjust to make the process of finding justice costly.
The Appeal Labyrinth: The Town of Castle Rock v. Gonzales
This issue actually came up to me in a conversation about the heartbreaking case of The Town of Castle Rock v. Gonzales. In June 1999, Jessica Lenahan-Gonzales was a resident of Castle Rock whose estranged husband kidnapped her children from her house, and when she called the police and asked them to enforce an active restraining order against him (he had been stalking her and her children). They did not react quickly, and 12 hours later, her children were found murdered in her estranged husband’s car after he engaged in a deadly shootout with the police.
Now, there is no good outcome from such a situation, especially for Jessica. However, one route for her was to sue the police department under, of all things, under a law originally passed to fight the KKK. In her lawsuit, she claimed the federal government had an interest in enforcement of the restraining order and alleged that the police department had “an official policy or custom of failing to respond properly to complaints of restraining order violations.”
Jessica’s case was initially dismissed by the District Court, but she appealed and, in 2002, it was reversed by the Tenth Circuit, which said she could recover under procedural due process but denied that she had a right to recover via substantive due process (for Scalia’s take on substantive due process in general, see this amazing video). However, the Circuit court also noted that while the town was liable, the officers were covered by qualified immunity.
The town appealed and actually was granted cert by the Supreme Court. SCOTUS reversed the Circuit Court in a 7-2 decision; Scalia wrote for the majority that officers were not required by law to immediately enforce restraining orders, that even if they were it would not give individuals a right to sue (instead, the right would be with the state). Lastly, he noted that even if enforceable, this would have no monetary value and could not lead to an individual payout via Due Process.
So, in the end, SCOTUS gave Jessica nothing. Now, we can all weigh in on whether Scalia ‘did justice’ to her; I have incredible sympathy for Jessica but happen to think his argument is correct, that under the law and Constitution, a restraining order does not give her the right to get money from the town. But I will say that the court did her a great injustice, in sending her down a 6-year rabbit hole of being denied, then allowed, then denied again from recovery. How, then, can we all agree that the court was unjust? The injustice was the delay. The injustice was the tremendous cost in time, money, and emotional damage. The injustice was that the process for answering the question of how a mother should react to the murder of her children and how a town should support her gave no closure, and instead just had transaction costs in landing her, in 2005, exactly in the same spot she was in 1999.
The Lazy Counter: justice takes time!
Now, angry lawyers out there, don’t mistake me here: I am not saying appeals never bring justice. I too am in awe of the work of the Equal Justice Initiative, which uses the appeals process to fight wrongful convictions. I am not arguing appeals are unjust. I am arguing that a legal system that takes 6 years and millions of dollars to answer any question is doing an injustice to EJI’s clients as well. Was Walter “Johnny D.” McMillian served well by a justice system that put him in jail for years while his appeal stagnated?
What is obvious here is that lawyers, in their blindered vision of pursuing justice, are doing their best to get to the right outcome, and while cost may be a consideration for process improvement, it is not a consideration for justice. Maybe a simpler, more transparent, faster court process would do a worse job. But I think that every complexity, opacity, and delay is an injustice done by our system to the people who are seeking justice through it, and I would be amazed if Johnny D would have been thankful for all the technicalities that could be used to get the right outcome after what the Alabama prison system put him through.
Is “justice” trying to do too much?
Unlike in the case of Johnny D, Jessica’s case may show how we stretch the bounds of the system to get to an outcome that feels right, rather than being by the rules. Johnny D was caught up by a racist abuse of criminal justice, which is intended to keep citizens safe; there was no ‘community solution’ available for the murder of which he was falsely accused.
Jessica, however, was simply not treated right by her town. Anyone, regardless of their politics or views, would hope that the town has some level of care for their aggrieved, and that the community could pull together around her. Obviously, this did not happen–and especially not by the town’s police department, which had the opportunity to admit it was asleep at the wheel under the knowledge that they had qualified immunity. Since community solutions were lacking, she brought a civil case, which had a desirable end–helping an aggrieved mother and recognizing that her case was mishandled–but inadequate and undesirable means: lawyers lawyering.
I would be amazed if Jessica herself thought of the connection of: restraining order->Ku Klux Klan Act->federal oversight of law enforcement->property recovery under the Due Process Clause->monetary damages for police inaction. From my legal education, this sounds like the highly technical argument of a creative activist lawyer, who wants to change the law as much as he wants to help his clients. So, were Jessica’s lawyers trying to do too much through the justice system? Was the better solution, then, not to turn back to the community and use public truth-telling or even honest requests for help?
The elites-for-the-people against the people
This made me react against a phenomenon I have seen across law schools, firms, and courts. At elite law schools, the administration touts the number of Access to Justice projects and amicus briefs written by faculty in cases like Gonzales. At elite law firms, they attract top performers with huge salaries, sure, but they mostly talk about how many interesting pro bono cases their associates can take on. And on top Circuit Courts, most famously the Ninth, my classmates go on to help judges think creatively about how to reach just outcomes via legal wrangling. All of these activities are done with a mix of noblesse oblige and self-importance, but are honestly intended to help find justice for the downtrodden. I simply think these do-gooders don’t notice that all these activities are costly.
If you are not a lawyer, you may not realize how systematic this cost has become. Non-lawyers view courts as places where people with causes of action come and get answers based on the law. Lawyers know better: this certainly happens, but in parallel, dozens of groups (plaintiffs lawyers and activist groups on all sides of every issue) are targeting certain laws and certain constitutional questions, and are searching madly for standing. As in, they comb the news and low-level lawsuits to find one they can fund through as many appeals as possible to get the law changed or even just to get a ruling on a fact pattern that is friendly to them. In this, let me pick on my own team: in Carpenter v. US, in which the government used the cell phone location records of Carpenter and his friends without a warrant to arrest and convict them of robberies, there were no fewer than 16 amicus briefs by privacy activists (the CEI, EPIC, EFF, the Fourth Amendment Scholars, and the list goes on). Carpenter v. US was about many deep legal deliberations on the importance of privacy, but I have to say, long before it reached SCOTUS, it was no longer about justice for Carpenter, who had been in jail for two years and who wasn’t getting out even if he won. While it was a victory for my ‘team’ in saying that the government needs warrants if it wants cell phone location records, maybe justice isn’t just about getting victories for my team, if that victory comes at the cost of multiple appeals, dozens of lawyers and clerks, national media coverage, uncertainty for cell phone users and companies, and those 16 institutions writing briefs.
I therefore ask proponents of justice, who are trying to use their elite position to improve the system’s outcomes for the downtrodden, to be a little bit more humble and self-focused. Instead of sitting in seminars or court sessions deliberating on ‘what is justice,’ ask whether the justice system is the right way to seek the right outcome. Ask whether, maybe, it would be better to go out and act positively toward your fellow man rather than demand money, time, and attention to the causes, cases, and opinions of the (all elite and elitist) members of legal groups.
Invasiveness is Injustice
Across all legal disputes, I think the thing that rankles me–and all non-lawyers–is how prominent law is in our lives. If I need to use the justice system, I know it will become a major part of my life’s spending, but even if I never am called into court, I know that court cases are going to continue to be high-profile, lawyers are going to continue to increase their share of the economy, and professors are going to keep publishing books, seminars, articles, and blogs about ‘how can people like me bring just outcomes?’
So, maybe, we can find some justice for all if the legal system simply recognizes that ‘what is justice’ is not a question of all-encompassing, existential values, but a question of how to run an institution. Maybe what is important here is not the rights that we seek to gain for the oppressed by any means necessary, but of building and maintaining a structure (a Constitution, if you will) where anyone can engage, or not, with a system that uses just methods. High cost, delay, opacity, and central control are not just methods and show that the system is not working effectively.
We can all agree, left and right, that regardless of the answer, the system, the method of justice is itself broken if it cannot help but be a burden. Justice should not be so costly in our lives, and it is a failing of lawyers and judges to make their own jobs so important, pervasive, in control. I hope, with all the fantastically intelligent amicus-brief-writers out there, we can find a way to at least cut back that injustice.
I propose a debate! The place: The NOL podcast. The people: anyone with fresh takes on copyright and patent in software (and who contacts me). The question: what are actions that businesses can take to carry out a vision of open collaboration via IP strategy?
As a former law student and current software company CEO, I have become frustrated with how abstract and academic IP discussions are. I know enough to be dangerous, and actually want to center in on: how can people like me use IP strategy to make our projects more open to collaboration, without making them exposed?
I’d love to get strategic advice in a debate environment. I’d also like to lay out below the IP landscape as I understand it to exist, and recall to some of the great IP visionaries of the early internet days, especially the Grateful Dead lyricist-turned-IP scholar, John Perry Barlow. Enjoy, and I will update this post once Brandon lets me set a date!
Copyrighting Code: Function masquerading as form
When I was taught about intellectual property, I learned about Google vs. Oracle, a case where the US Supreme Court considered the question, “Are API’s functional?” This may seem a strange question (when I ask computer scientists this question they always laugh helplessly), but the background is: According to US Copyright Law, “In no case does copyright protection . . . extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such work.” This means that code may be copyrighted if descriptive but not if a functional, ‘useful article‘–and so, the esteemed Court needed to decide, effectively, is the Application Program Interface (API) code that allows softwares to request or send data purely decorative?
Until the Supreme Court, thank god, ruled that copying API code was in fact a “fair use” of API’s, the lower court’s ruling had actually held that: (1) API’s are creative, nonfunctional, and copyrightable, and (2) Google owed Oracle money for their impudent CTRL + C of API code. I’m relieved Google won, but I was totally shocked that the Supreme Court reversed only part two of the lower court decision, leaving part one unaddressed. I actually was speechless, because if they recognized it was a fair copying (in the case that API’s were useful), how could they still allow Oracle to claim copyright over them in the first place?
This is just one of the ways in which law school showed me that IP law had a reckoning, from the 1990’s to today, on how it should live on in a field that has undermined its very purposes for existing. By that I mean, if intellectual property keeps people from copying inventors and thus reducing their benefit (compared against patent-granted artificial monopolies) or raising their cost (from the cost of printing, one of the key justifications of copyright), how will it live on in the world where printing is free and inventions benefit more from CTRL + C than they suffer?
Patenting Code: Calling Dibs on How Everything Works
While my copyright classes mostly shocked me by showing me how much we lie and pretend useful things are ‘creative’, patent classes astounded me in the ways companies would assert that they invented general practices. Patents are only supposed to be eligible if they are novel, useful, and non-obvious, and they cannot cover nature, abstractions, or mathematical formulas. Or, rather, that is what the rules say; the actuality is that patents constantly used to monopolize basic processes like “one click” buying or “rounding the edges of a square.” However, rather than pick on low-hanging fruit, I’ll note that the current leading case in software process patents is Alice v. CLS, which like Google v. Oracle, struck down IP for a very limited reason that betrays the nonsense that patents are in a digital world.
Alice Corp. had patented a software method for financial trading systems to reduce ‘settlement risk,’ the risk that one party does what they are supposed to do and the other does not. This sounds fancy, but if you read the early opinions, even the district court judge noticed that the patent basically covered the idea “of employing an intermediary to facilitate simultaneous exchange of obligations in order to minimize risk.”
This made it all the way to the Supreme Court, and thank god, they decided that Alice failed the following test of patentability of methods related to abstract ideas: (1) does the software method contain an abstract idea? (2) If yes, did the patenter add an “inventive concept” that gives the idea “something extra.”
In case you were wondering, yes, they literally said “something extra.”
Thus ended a multi-year lawsuit over whether Alice could stop other companies from minimizing risk. As if we need any more proof that judges and lawyers simply cannot understand how coding works, or how invention works, or how natural law works, one appellate judge recommended extremely broad patentability of general principles, abusing the Einstein quote of “even gravity is not a natural law” to imply that, maybe, Einstein could have patented general relativity?
These sorts of vague precedents that leave the door open to patenting basic processes. Outside of software, there are a Myriad of cases (pun intended, about a case where the Supreme Court ruled that excised DNA was patentable because Myriad figured out how to slice it) where judges let companies patent things that stretch credulity. It makes me wonder, especially given that research on the history of patents in the physical world shows that patents often hamper and harm innovators that make me question what we restrict in the name of rewarding innovators. In DNA, patents have overreached in an attempt to control a growing, organic, copying engine. In software, they often do the same, leaving developers in fear of the power of CTRL + C.
The shared vision: Wine without Bottles:
In setting up this debate, I am stealing the creative work of IP pioneer and Grateful Dead lyricist, John Perry Barlow, who posed the following riddle:
If our property can be infinitely reproduced and instantaneously distributed all over the planet without cost, without our knowledge, without its even leaving our possession, how can we protect it? How are we going to get paid for the work we do with our minds? And, if we can’t get paid, what will assure the continued creation and distribution of such work?
Barlow’s central question cuts to the very core of IP. If the goal of restricting CTRL + C was to reward innovators for generating copies of their work, what is the point of these restrictions when generating copies is free? If we no longer must pay to produce bottles to hold our wine, and it flows forth as a bounty from the springs of invention, should we force this flood to be contained at all?
The riddle has but one answer, and I cannot say it better than Barlow; anyone who is interested should read his whole treatise on Wine without Bottles here. I will add only that, as an inventor, I know that his vision of bottlers minding their own business has not come to pass fully, but that the growth of open-source projects shows that bottling code does not, in fact, age it like fine wine. In fact, if you follow the money, “Smart developers like to hang out with smart code. When you open-source useful code, you attract talent.” This gives me hope, and I want to build on that hope with ways to make his vision a reality.
Let’s debate the best way to enact a vision, rather than the vision
As an inventor considering how to build a successful software company meaning that I literally face the question of how to engage with the IP system, this question is one in which I am deeply interested. I’d like to hear fresh takes on how entrepreneurs can realistically act when deciding, should we bottle our wine? Should we allow other people to bottle and sell it? If my goal is to bring wine to those who are thirsty, how can I think about bottles?
Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.
We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.
We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.
Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here
. . . .
You [world governments] are terrified of your own children, since they are natives in a world where you will always be immigrants. Because you fear them, you entrust your bureaucracies with the parental responsibilities you are too cowardly to confront yourselves. In our world, all the sentiments and expressions of humanity, from the debasing to the angelic, are parts of a seamless whole, the global conversation of bits. We cannot separate the air that chokes from the air upon which wings beat.
Notes On Liberty 