Annihilation from Within

attack a major nation from within even if that nation possesses enormous military strength and capable police forces. If this new tyrant turns out to be strategically intelligent, he could prepare to launch a couple of mass destruction weapons against carefully chosen targets—without training camps in another nation, without help from a foreign terrorist organization, without a military campaign across the nation’s borders. He would thus offer no targets for retaliation and render useless a nation’s most powerful deterrent forces. By contrast, an expanding caliphate—the utopia that jihadists dream about—would offer the leading democracies plenty of easy targets for retaliation.
The purpose of this new tyrant would not be to destroy landmark buildings, highjack airplanes, attack railroad stations and religious shrines. His aim would be to paralyze the national leadership and spread nationwide panic, to ensure that the center could not hold. He would be well prepared to exploit this chaos by seizing complete control of the nation’s government and imposing his dictatorship. Success in any such endeavor would be a shattering event, signifying to democracies everywhere that their world, their basic institutions, their national security strategies, their citizens’ everyday lives—that all this was now up for grabs. Living comfortably on borrowed time, most democratic societies lack the will and foresight needed to defend against any such calamity.
Non-democratic governments will also be vulnerable—indeed, more vulnerable—to annihilation from within. In those Central Asian republics, for example, where authoritarian rulers confront large Muslim populations who want a fundamentalist Islamic state, the detonation of a single nuclear bomb in the capital would create a political vacuum. This could enable a religious leader (perhaps a cleric like Iraq’s Muqtada al-Sadr) to mobilize his throngs of followers and seize control of the country.
Today’s military planners have not given much thought to averting annihilation from within. The conventional wisdom about the world’s future holds that it is steadily becoming more democratic and therefore more peaceful. Technological progress is said to make all countries interdependent—to push us toward a unified world in which distance is no longer an impediment to travel and trade and, thanks to the Internet, has been erased entirely as an obstacle to communications. The appealing vision of a new “flat world” has left many commentators blind to the dark side of technological progress.
THE HISTORICAL PASSAGES IN THIS BOOK explain the origins of our new predicament. If we hope to navigate our way past the deadly threats confronting us, it will help to understand the roots and evolution of the historic forces that have unleashed them. They originated some 250 years ago in Western Europe, in a schism in mankind’s culture. Science was rather suddenly freed from political and religious controls. The ascendance of Enlightenment thinking diminished the influence of religious beliefs, a development in which the Protestant Reformation also played a role. And government policies that increasingly promoted a free market served to promote, and handsomely reward, technological advances.
Since then, technological progress has brought immense improvements in the human condition. These gains seemed to outweigh all the potential applications of technology that would be destructive or harmful. But surprisingly, already at the very beginning of the Industrial Revolution, many thinkers had a foreboding of technology’s dark side. And today we begin to understand the dangerous dynamic of the cultural schism.
As a result of this schism, two modes of human thought and activity split apart. One mode is animated by religious faiths, ethnic and national traditions, and societal customs. This mode remained essentially the same as it had been before the schism. It shapes the basic structure of society and nourishes the sense of patriotism and loyalty that enables nations to function. But the other mode of thinking is guided by science, which seeks to understand the workings of nature by relying on empirical verification, not on a definition of “truth” handed down through generations. Our growing knowledge of the physical universe has enabled us to transform our environment progressively and to alter the human condition. Following the initial cultural schism, the accelerating scientific and technological progress gave us the Industrial Revolution, which in turn spread progress to more and more countries and changed the face of our planet.
One might plausibly observe that this story is old hat. But what the standard narrative leaves out is the most important part of the saga, namely that the cultural schism is still widening—and dangerously so. Technological progress and the global political order march to different drummers.
Science makes cumulative discoveries and hence can advance at an accelerating pace. It has acquired an inner dynamic of progress that is nearly self-sustaining. But the sphere of government and international affairs is marked by alternating periods of advance and decline, of gains and losses. Individual liberty expands and is suppressed again. Peace is followed by war and war by a new peace. Religious tolerance is followed by theocratic repression, to be replaced by a more secular regime. Periods of free trade are followed by protectionism and again by new efforts to spread free trade. In sum, the political, social, and religious sphere moves in a zigzag course, while science makes cumulative advances.
The two modes of human thought and activity that split apart some 250 years ago are destined to drift farther apart because disparate aspirations of the two modes aggravate the widening schism. Science and technology do not have a final goal. They pursue a continuing conquest of nature in which disproved theories are replaced by new knowledge. But political endeavors have finite goals. Marxism did not aspire to be followed by capitalism, Islam does not seek to be replaced by Christianity, America’s propagation of democracy does not strive to be succeeded by autocratic governments.
This widening divergence in human culture might overwhelm the political order of the world in a way that endangers the survival of all nations. And, bear in mind, only sovereign nations can marshal troops and rally political support to defeat terrorist organizations, deter aggression, enforce UN decisions. When push comes to shove, only nations can keep some