Word: virtually
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...attacks turn out to be harbingers of a new, epochal war and the extreme change in the constitutional order that follows such a war. Al-Qaeda, the group responsible for the attacks that day, represents a new and profoundly dangerous kind of organization--one that might be called a "virtual state." The virtual state has many of the characteristics of other states (a trained standing army and intelligence cadre; a treasury and a source of revenue; a civil service and even a rudimentary welfare system for the families of its fighters) but is borderless; it declares wars, makes alliances with...
...Sept. 11, a virtual state proved that modern societies are vulnerable as never before--vulnerable because both the advanced technologies and civil openness they have worked so successfully to develop can be used against them. The U.S. has learned over the years how to deter threats from adversaries like the Soviet Union; now it must learn how to stop the more elusive threat posed by virtual states. To understand how protracted such struggles can be, it's worth taking a quick look back...
Deterrence, for example, which has been the core of U.S. national-security policy for decades, depends on the threat of retaliation, which in turn depends on knowing who and where your enemy is. When agents of a shadowy virtual state obtain weapons of mass destruction, we face an adversary not subject to conventional deterrence. In this new world, then, deterrence must be supplemented by strategies that rely on defense, focus on reducing our vulnerabilities and include the option of pre-emptive attack. It is not fear of attack from Iraq that moves the Bush Administration to seek a regime change...
...evolution will continue. Because private companies manage most of the critical infrastructures of the developed world, market states will be forced to integrate the private sector into strategic planning. They will have to develop international patterns of cooperation--pooling intelligence, for instance--or lose the war against virtual states and terrorism. Above all, market states will change the premise of governing: unable to deliver on the promise of ever increasing well-being for all, states will promise only to increase opportunity and minimize the risk for all as best they can. And because markets are not effective at encouraging such...
...could help determine which kind of Long War comes. It could be characterized by aging nation-states trying to fight off rising market states, with a virtual state entering into an unofficial alliance with one side or another. More likely it will see clashes between competing forms of market states. It may be a chronic war of low-intensity interventions--police actions on humanitarian grounds, to undergird states in which law has collapsed, or against terrorism. Or this war could be a series of regional cataclysms, perhaps between nuclear powers on the Indian subcontinent or in Northeast Asia...