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The Future of Power Transcript The Future of Power Joseph Nye University Distinguished Service Professor, Harvard University Chair: Sir Jeremy Greenstock Former British Ambassador to the United Nations (1998-2003) 10 May 2011 The views expressed in this document are the sole responsibility of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the view of Chatham House, its staff, associates or Council. Chatham House is independent and owes no allegiance to any government or to any political body. It does not take institutional positions on policy issues. This document is issued on the understanding that if any extract is used, the speaker(s) and Chatham House should be credited, preferably with the details of the event. Where this document refers to or reports statements made by speakers at an event every effort has been made to provide a fair representation of their views and opinions, but the ultimate responsibility for accuracy lies with this document’s author(s). The published text of speeches and presentations may differ from delivery. Transcript: The Future of Power Joseph Nye: I’d like to be not a typical professor in the sense of not speaking in fifty-minute bytes at a time, but restrain myself and follow Jeremy’s good instruction. Having been a visitor to Ditchley a few times I know he runs a very tight ship. The argument that I make in this new book about the future of powers, that there are two large power shifts going on in this century. One, I call power transition, which is a shift of power among states, which is largely from West to East. And the other is a shift of power from states, West or East, to non- state actors. And those two are going to mark this century. And we are only just beginning to think through how we’re going to deal with this. So what I’d like to do is describe each of them in turn. And then at the end pull them together in terms of what it means for policy. If we think of power transition (the movement of West to East); you can best understand it by imagining the world, or a picture of the world in the year 1800. You’d see that more than half the world’s population is in Asia and more than half the world’s product is in Asia. But if you took the same picture in 1900, still more than half the world’s population, but only 20% of the world’s product. Obviously that’s not something that happened to Asia, it’s the industrial revolution in Europe and North America. Now what we are seeing in this century is, what I would call, the recovery of Asia to normal proportions, roughly half the world’s population and half the world’s product. And that really starts with Japan, it goes on to Korea, to Southeast Asian countries like Singapore and Malaysia. Now we are very much focussed on [China], with its ten percent growth rates. Though I don’t think they are going to stay at ten percent. And increasingly we will be focussed on India, which is now growing at eight and nine percent growth. But what the net effect of this will be, essentially, is a shift of the power of the world economy from West to East. Now let me hold that thought there and then come back to it, and some of its political implications, while I introduce to you the second concept, which represents a great shift in this century, which is power diffusion away from states to non-state actors. The best way to wrap your minds around this idea of power diffusion is to think about the nature of the information revolution which we have been seeing in its latest incarnation in the last thirty/forty years. The price of computing dropped a thousand fold in the last quarter of the 20th century. That’s such an abstract number that it’s hard to think about. But if you imagine that the price of automobiles had dropped the same way, you’d be www.chathamhouse.org.uk 2 Transcript: The Future of Power able to buy an automobile today for five pounds. Now any time the price of something declines that dramatically, the barriers to entry go down. So things that previously were outside the range of many actors, are now within their price range. I can think of an example from when I was in the Carter administration dealing with the politics of non-proliferation. One of the great secrets that we had, is we could take a picture of any place on earth with one metre resolution. It cost us billions and billions of dollars. Today any of you can go onto Google Earth and get a better picture for free. That is an extraordinary change in what technology, what information technology’s done in terms of empowerment of those who previously were priced out of the market. Now if you think about who is empowered by this, it doesn’t mean the end of the nation state. It just means that the governments are acting on a stage which is much more crowded, because of all these new actors who could play. And some of these new actors are good, and some of them are bad. Oxfam, obviously good. al-Qaeda, to my mind, obviously bad. But what’s interesting is the power which is provided. For example, al-Qaeda was able to kill more Americans in 2001, than the government of Japan was able to kill in December 1941. That might be called the privatisation of war. That’s quite new in world politics. And there are many other examples I could give, of the way in which the information revolution has led to this diffusion of power. Think of change, let’s say, in the Middle East. It was often said that in the Middle East, there was no choice between the autocrat and the religious extremists. There was no middle. But I think what this burgeoning of information did was create a new middle, which we saw in places like Tahrir Square. And also provided techniques like Twitter and Facebook, by which these groups could overcome the problems of collective action and coordinate with each other. If you look at another example, think of Wikileaks. Stealing classified documents from a government is not new, it’s probably as old as governments and as old as espionage. But being able to exfiltrate a warehouse full of State Department secret cables on a Lady Gaga disc, and spread it immediately around the world, that is new. And that difference in quantity becomes a difference in quality. Or to give you another example of ways in which the diffusion of information has mattered. Think of the problems that we face when we deal with cyber security. Now I don’t know how many of you have seen, or maybe even remember, a wonderful cartoon that was in the New Yorker about a decade or www.chathamhouse.org.uk 3 Transcript: The Future of Power so ago. And it was a picture of a computer and two dogs sitting in front of the computer. The one dog turns to the other dog and says ‘Don’t worry. On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.’ And that cartoon was not only wonderful humour it was also politically prescient. Because what it suggested is that the anonymity of the internet, and the empowerment, means that we won’t always know who it is that’s attacking us. So think of the Stuxnet worm, which was used to get some of the centrifuges in the Iranian nuclear programme to shake themselves to death. Then imagine that, a year or two from now, the lights go out in the Southern half of Britain, or the Northeast of the United States. And it turns out that it was done by a Stuxnet type worm coming at us. In those circumstances, how would we know who did it? It might be another government. It might be some hackers. It might be a criminal gang. It might be cyber terrorists. The one thing that we would know is that whoever was clever enough to do this to us would also be clever enough to route it in such a way that it would not have come from where it seemed to have come from. So you trace it back to servers in Beijing or Moscow or wherever, that would assuredly mean that it didn’t come from there. So if that’s the case, how do you retaliate? Where do you send the cruise missile if you don’t know the return address? And we are only beginning to think our way through this. What is the strategy? What is offence? What is defence? What is deterrence when you don’t have attribution and when non-state actors may be at the heart of it? We are in this area of cyber, about where we were with nuclear technology in 1950. We know there’s something there, it’s big, but we haven’t thought our way through it yet. So these are examples if you want of the way that the information revolution is creating a diffusion of power away from governments to non-state actors. Developing super empowered groups and individuals, which are making large changes in world politics and power in this century. Now let me take you back to the question of power transition.
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