6. Why Chess Is an Inappropriate Metaphor for International Relations, Why Jackson Pollack Paintings Are a Better but Still Inadequate Metaphor, and Why This Has Profound Political Consequences

The chess game is a frequent metaphor for the business of international relations. Artfully shot photographs of kings and knights adorn many a book or scholarly article (particularly those about the theory of “IR”). The chess game appeals as analogy because it is complicated, it involves two clearly defined opponents and, above all, because although a very difficult game, it is ultimately comprehensible: There may be a very large number of permutations (according to Garry Kasparov, there are 10¹²⁰ possible games), but there are a limited number of outcomes. Computers can be programmed to play chess, as well as if not better than the best human players.

Such metaphors, therefore, have a reassuring quality: If the game is played well by a state, a government, they will win, or at least prevent a loss—as long as our players, or computers and software, are good enough. The shape and possibilities of the pieces and board are known and finite. It’s comforting to think that foreign policy is a bit like pulling a lever, and after some whirring and clicking, a result pops out at the other end. Historians and commentators reinforce this suggestion. Their articles and books abound with the linear narrative: Decision A leads to policy B leads to outcome C; if only Washington adopts policy x, result y will surely follow.

Maps and atlases evoke a similar effect. None of them portrays a world as it is: No globe is big enough. Jorge Luis Borges suggested such a map in his wonderful story Of Exactitude in Science: a map to the scale of the Earth, with every manhole cover, every goat path depicted as it actually is. Such a map would be perfectly accurate but of course wholly useless. All depictions must therefore reduce and thereby distort. All maps are nonetheless imbued with a certain implied confidence that their delineations are meaningful and significant. The neatly drawn lines, dots and shadings convey a message that the world is ultimately known and demarcated, complicated but clearly defined.

There are several problems with the chess metaphor, and indeed with the conventional way of thinking about international relations. In the discomforting reality of the world today, the number of relevant actors who may affect the outcome is invariably far greater than two, the potential moves of these multiple players is unlimited, and therefore the number of possible interactions in a globalized world is certainly greater than 10¹²⁰, even though this is already an unimaginably big number.

Multiply the billions of connected humans in today’s world by the actions available to them, then throw in the reactions and counterreactions to these initial actions, run the calculation for even a short while, and you will end up with an impossibly large number of possible outcomes. That number is massive and possibly infinite; there are probably insufficient atoms in the universe to equal it. Given this reality, the hope of a foreign policy of deliberate action to produce predictable results looks increasingly vain. Instead of pulling a lever on a machine to produce a predictable result, making foreign policy starts to look more like a roll of the dice—or more accurately, selecting a number between one and infinity.

Few dare acknowledge what increasingly appears to be the truth—that the world has no defined shape, aside from its continents, rivers and oceans, and even these shift form and location, now at an alarming speed. That instead of a chessboard or a web, it is in fact a swirling miasma of billions upon billions of interactions, not on a fixed pattern, or a net, but an ever-changing mesh of connections, some significant but temporary, some long-lasting but inconsequential, a reality more evocative of the swirls and spatters of a Jackson Pollack painting than a chessboard.

When we look at some illustrations drawn from this maelstrom, you’ll see the dilemma….

In 2009, a spate of high-profile kidnapings in Phenix left Arizona the kidnapping capital of the United States. That same year, eighteen people were killed in Mexico City after a gang of hooded gunmen attacked a local drug treatment facility, apparently a refuge for rival gang members. The connection between these two phenomena was a seemingly harmless U.S. policy aimed at improving border enforcement with Mexico. The policy was designed in part to placate a domestic constituency alarmed at high rates of illegal immigration. But it had the adverse and unexpected consequence of aggravating a series of drug wars in Mexico. By slowing migration from Mexico, so too it slowed the transfer of drugs to the north. But as drug supply in the U.S. fell, supplies increased dramatically in Mexico, lowering domestic prices and fueling a spike in local drug consumption. Over the next months, gang-related violence and kidnapings surged as new and old gangs alike sought to mark out their turf in the newly developing marketplace. With thousands dead and the violence spreading back to American territory, U.S. policy makers are now forced to contend with the unintended consequences of actions once thought to bring greater stability to America’s southern border.

It is now well known that Osama bin Laden’s involvement in the battle of the Afghan mujahideen against the Soviet army served as the springboard for Al Qaeda’s campaign of global jihad. The defeat of that army’s occupation of Afghanistan, among other factors, helped contribute to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet empire. Though bin Laden and Saddam Hussein were wholly unconnected, the 9/11 attacks created the political momentum for the invasion of Iraq.[173] That invasion indirectly led to the de facto separation of Iraq’s Kurdish north, the rise of Iran as the dominant regional power and, likely and tragically, the demise of the Christian community in Iraq, driven out by sectarian violence. None of these outcomes was predicted, even by the invasion’s most imaginative planners.

The weapons and influence of Al Qaeda were a function of bin Laden’s personal wealth, which was itself a consequence of his father’s large fortune, made from building for the royal family and others well connected in oil-rich Saudi Arabia, his home country, a long-standing U.S. ally. The “original” Al Qaeda, as some analysts now call it, has meanwhile spawned several deadly affiliates or “franchises,” a name reminiscent of the spread of McDonald’s burger restaurants—Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), AQ in Somalia, AQ in Afghanistan, the “Nigerian Taliban” Boko Haram, and terrorist groups without names in London and Miami—and has helped inspire murderous attacks from Fort Hood, Texas, to Bali and Mumbai. One of the planners of the Mumbai rampage, which cost nearly two hundred lives, was an American who also, it turns out, was for a while an agent for America’s Drug Enforcement Agency, which wanted his help in locating heroin suppliers in Pakistan. The DEA, it appears, failed to inform other parts of the massive U.S. intelligence machinery.

Elsewhere, Al Qaeda is also loosely associated with, and serves as inspiration for, the Al Shabaab Islamist militia, which currently controls much of southern and central Somalia.

Here, the insatiable global appetite for fish has driven international fishing fleets—from Japan, Russia and Europe—to plunder Somalia’s unprotected waters, denying a livelihood to Somalia’s many coastal fishermen. Partly as a result (there are other reasons too), some have turned to piracy, hijacking vessels in a lucrative trade, which a substantial flotilla of heavily armed ultramodern warships deployed in the area has failed so far to prevent. This naval fleet, sometimes numbering as many as twenty or more vessels, embodies unprecedented international cooperation, including warships from former antagonists like Russia, NATO, India and China. “Combined Task Force 150” also includes the European Union’s first ever joint naval deployment. But so far, this unique and expensive military collaboration has failed to stop or deter the pirates. More people were taken hostage at sea in 2010 than in any previous year on record.[113]

Some of the proceeds of that piracy, where ship owners often pay several million dollars to liberate their captured vessels and crews, have found their way to Al Shabaab, which has used the money to purchase weapons with which to fight its insurgency against the internationally backed Somali Transitional Federal Government in Mogadishu. Young men are now traveling from the U.S., Britain and elsewhere to train with Al Shabaab and their piracy-funded weapons. National security agencies—MI5, the FBI—have warned of the danger that these radicalized young men pose on their return to their “home” countries, trained and ready to commit further acts of violence. In late 2010, a young Somali-American sought to detonate a bomb at a Christmas tree lighting ceremony in Portland, Oregon.

Such effects are inherently unpredictable and can appear random, even though some causes and some effects are, at least in retrospect, discernible. They do not follow the neat patterns of a flow chart or a mathematical equation. Though multiple and complex, the model of a chess game is no more appropriate, either. What we witness in the world is not ordered, at least in a sequential, logical fashion, but neither is it chaos. It is entirely wrong to say that the pattern of cause and effect in the world today is chaotic or anarchic, even if sometimes it seems that way. It may resemble chaos, but in fact it is a hugely complex and dynamic mesh of multiple cause and effect and back again (even Jackson Pollack paintings comprise an underlying order). Given this reality, any model or any metaphor may oversimplify and thus distort this nature—an artificial simplicity imposed upon complexity.

Only later will historians, masters of the reductive art of the narrative, be able to put shape to what seems today formless, and even then they will be capturing but a tiny part of what comprises existence now. For now, a better depiction suggests itself, a fantastic mélange with ends and connections that shift, merge and disappear. To shape this mesh, to put form to it, to give it names, is to change it, to reduce it and ultimately to fail to understand it completely. Unfortunately, this is precisely what governments are required to do.

It is conventional wisdom that with myriad international problems that cross frontiers, the world needs ever more international diplomacy and engagement. But it may be, in fact, that we need less, at least of the kind that currently predominates—the lattice of state-to-state relations and multilateral institutions.

There are now a great many international negotiation processes addressing a bewildering array of problems, from the familiar—climate change, nuclear proliferation—to the obscure—postal standards and the standardization of measurements. But on the most acute and urgent problems, the evidence is mounting that these processes are not delivering the necessary results—effective solutions to the world’s international problems. The measure of the effectiveness of this form of politics must be as for any form of politics: What are the outputs? What are the real effects on real problems and people?

The climate change “process,” with its summits at Copenhagen (2009) and Cancún (2010), has comprised hundreds of meetings involving thousands of delegates and, on more than one occasion, “world leaders.” But the process has yet to produce any substantive agreement, let alone concrete and plausibly effective measures, to reduce atmospheric carbon, despite the vast expenditure of negotiating energy and voluminous reams of treaty text and media commentary. Meanwhile, the concentration of carbon in the atmosphere continues to rise.

The G8 Gleneagles summit in 2005 was notable for the extraordinary length and height of the fences erected, and the ten thousand police required, to keep protesters away from the tiny group of decision makers meeting in the remote Scottish location. The summiteers themselves sought to make history by their commitment to $50 billion in new aid money. This announcement was claimed to “make poverty history,” echoing the rhetoric of the huge “Make Poverty History” campaign, which culminated in several massive “Live8” concerts that summer, where those enjoying the music in person or on television were encouraged to lobby their leaders by sending them text messages asking them to relieve Third World debt. At the UN World Summit later that year, all member states of the UN recommitted themselves to the goal of reducing absolute poverty by half by 2015—the headline target of the so-called Millennium Development Goals. (MDG).

It is depressing to relate the utter failure of those making these commitments to keep to them.[114] Of those making the Gleneagles declaration, all serious countries and seven of them more or less democracies, not one fulfilled the promise they had made. Five years after Gleneagles, it was estimated that G8 pledges would fall short by $20 billion.[115] The U.S. and European Union had done virtually nothing to remove the import barriers and agricultural subsidies that do much to stymie economic growth in developing countries. By 2010, the G8 itself, perhaps out of embarrassment, had ceased mentioning its aid goals in its communiqués. It did, however, make play of yet another new “initiative,” this time to target maternal health. The most recent assessment of the MDG is that they will certainly not be attained, an unsurprising assessment given the paltry efforts made by the signatories of the UN declaration to substantiate their rhetoric. Of one thing, however, we can be sure: There will be more such declarations, freshened up with new slogans and impassioned speeches or tweets, or Facebook pages, or whatever, in future.

The recent financial crisis has occasioned massed bouts of international hand-wringing over global regulation of banking and investment. The G20 countries has emerged as the leading forum to discuss such measures, clearly necessary to manage the out-of-control flows of unintelligible financial instruments, like the infamous “collateralized debt obligations” (CDOs) that spread risk with no oversight. But despite repeated meetings, communiqués and speeches, here too no effective policy response has emerged. It has instead become clear that the financial industry’s lobbyists in each country have conspired to ensure that every government is unwilling to trade their supposed competitive advantage for collective measures, like globally agreed and sufficient capital requirements for lenders. To satiate public concern, instead these meetings offer “commitments” to effective controls, and “processes” to discuss them—no doubt without cease until the next crisis erupts. Thus, the impression of activity is created, the absence of concrete action obscured.

Given the gravity of the problems that these international processes are supposed to address, and yet their feeble outputs, it’s urgent to consider what’s going on. The cynical might argue that these processes are simply rackets run by the powerful, who have no intrinsic interest in success. In its own way, this is a comforting and self-serving excuse that requires little response save cynicism on our part. But my own experience of diplomacy and international negotiation suggests something more subtle is the problem.

Invariably, when these negotiations and conferences fail, commentators are quick to point fingers at one participant or other for derailing the process: the Chinese for eviscerating the Copenhagen climate change talks, France for blocking Security Council authority for the invasion of Iraq in 2003. But these accusations may be missing the point: The problem of international diplomacy is not the actors within it, though their actions may hint at the more submerged problem. The real problem may be concealed within the very system itself. Indeed, the problem may be the system.

Diplomacy is a system. Any system—like a club—requires certain characteristics in order to participate. And it reinforces these characteristics merely by existing and by requiring its members to exhibit these characteristics. The current international system comprises the conventional institutions of diplomacy. From these institutions, we can see clearly what characteristics are required to participate.

Diplomacy and international relations are, by their nature, about nation states. The United Nations, the European Union, ASEAN, the World Trade Organization, the G20 are all associations of states. This may seem a very obvious and trite point to emphasize, but it is essential. For my experience suggests that states, and their exponents, do not accurately reflect what humans are about, nor what they want. Thus, it is naive to expect that their machinations, in the form of interstate diplomacy, will produce results consistent with humanity’s needs in general.

This problem takes several different forms, and the evidence for it, if you choose to look, is manifold. The first is that the connection between what states do and say in international negotiations and what their populations think is now extremely tenuous, to say the least. In democracies, the international representative of the state is accountable to their home ministry, which is led by a politician who is accountable to the legislature, which is ultimately accountable to the population which elects its members. This is already a very long chain of explanation and accountability.

A good example of an acutely important but complicated issue is Iraq policy. My experience dealing with Iraq policy was that only the very small group at the coalface of the policy had any hope of a comprehensive grasp of the many and diverse issues at stake: WMD, sanctions, international law, the dynamics of the UN Security Council, to mention just a few, all of which themselves were extraordinarily complicated. My ministers, whose job it was to explain and “sell” the policy in public and to Parliament, usually had only a very general and hazy grasp of the subject. In Parliament, there were no MPs who could equal the officials’ knowledge and expertize, and thus properly hold them to account. In any case, during the four and a half years that I worked on Iraq policy inside the British government, I was never questioned by any MP directly about my work, nor did any journalist ever closely question me with any serious expertize. The picture in the U.S. is similar.

One consequence of this extraordinarily dissociated chain between diplomat and citizen is that the diplomat can have no accurate idea of what the citizen wants. Hence, this requires diplomats to assume, or rather invent what they think the citizen—his nation—wants. I know this because I did this myself many times. It is a function of the inculcation process diplomats must go through to join and then embody their profession—the assumption that “we” know best. Diplomats, by the nature of their job, are encouraged to believe that they can determine what is in their nation’s interests, without consulting those in whose name they claim to be operating.

This process of assuming or inventing the desires and requirements of a state, often called “interests,” is usually conducted in secret by exchange of telegrams or classified e-mails, or in policy submissions to senior officials and political masters. I have participated many times in such exercises. With exquisite concision, the official will describe the issue at hand, then he or she will articulate what is at stake for “us”—our “interests,” in short. In recent years, it has become fashionable for the exponents of foreign policy to talk about “values” as important in diplomacy—things like democracy and human rights. But in truth, the underlying calculus remains little changed, as does the diplomatic mindset, and this is no surprise, for it is only natural for the exponent of the state to think in terms of what his state needs and wants; it is to the diplomat as to a cow eating grass or mooing; it is what they do.

It would be absurd for a diplomat to adopt a different set of criteria to guide their work and policies, and would certainly guarantee a short career. Such interests typically, and by inherited tradition, take the form of a hierarchy of priorities where security—the requirement to secure the state and its population—ranks at the top, followed by economic interests. There is little rigor in these delineations and orderings, and indeed only rarely do officials distinguish between types of interest, instead talking in more general terms about what “we” may want in any given situation. The identification between diplomat and state cannot be overemphasized. While both security and economic interests would fit onto most people’s lists of what is important, only a very few people would, I suspect, declare them as paramount in all situations or as their sole requirements in any situation.

The premise of the international system, and the state exponents who populate it, is a fundamentally incredible one—that the needs and wants of the Earth’s billions of people can be boiled down into separate and discrete subsets of interests which can then be meaningfully arbitrated. This is difficult to grasp because we have become so acclimatized to the state-based system: the international diplomatic forums with their neatly lettered name cards adorning serried rows at the UN General Assembly or European Council. But reflect for a moment and the absurdity becomes clear: How is it a tiny group of people can possibly know what is best for their country of millions? By extension, it is equally implausible to expect that a collection of such tiny groups, meeting at, say, the UN or G20, can produce meaningful and effective agreements for the whole globe? The disconnection is simply too great. They are required to assume, to guess. They know it, as I knew it. But it is the rest who believe it.

The problem is more insidious and damaging in its effects than merely this. The requirement of the system is that the needs and wants of the world’s peoples are reduced into such subsets—a reductive requirement. That need to reduce the complexity of reality into simplicity imposes upon the diplomats and other denizens of the system an unnatural and distorting burden—to turn their understanding of the world, and our needs upon it, into something else: the calculus of states. Most of the time this process is invisible, assumed and unremarked upon. Only occasionally are its aberrations so gross that they break the surface of our indifference—for me, it was the experience of Iraq sanctions where I realized, and only in retrospect, the gross divide between my own beliefs and understanding of what was right, and the way I was required to think—and do—at the time.

There is an additional negative consequence of this state-dominated mode of thinking. The chess game requires two sides to be played: white and black. The process of simplifying and overstating our own needs, known as calculating our interests, requires a reciprocal technique. If there is to be an “Us,” there must also be a “Them.”

This happened on the Iraq sanctions issue at the UN Security Council, where the diplomats gaily perpetuated the national divisions between opposing delegations, even when there were no facts to disagree over. I was a willing participant in this farce: the UK/U.S. would veto proposals made by the “other” side, in this case France and Russia, even if we ourselves had made the very same proposal a few weeks earlier and they had blocked them. The effect of such essentializing—the segregation of ourselves into two competing sides—was not to reduce conflict, but to perpetuate it.

It is not coincidence that it is governments that perform this essentializing. They must. It is necessary for government, and the diplomats who represent it, and the politicians who lead it, to claim that only they can speak for the whole country. Equally, therefore, they must affirm the nature of the international system by accepting that other governments speak for their whole countries. A modern diplomat would deny that they are so crass as to generalize about other cultures and countries in the way that I have described. Of course, they aver, when they talk about Iran’s policy, they mean the policy of the Iranian government, and indeed that is often how they will describe it.

But despite this designative care, the habit of referring to whole countries in the singular and referring to their government as the embodiment of that state is one as deep-rooted as the state-based international system itself. To change the naming of the actors, to remove the assumption that governments represent the whole of their countries, would be to change the nature of the international system, from one based around states as the primary unit of agency, to one based on some other unit. But as long as governments wish to hold sway in international policy and decision making, they must continually reaffirm not only their own but each other’s legitimacy to speak for their countries, even when the government is as grotesquely undemocratic as, say, the Syrian or North Korean regimes.

One of the seminal texts that helped define the nature of diplomacy is by François de Callières in Paris, published in 1716.[116] De Callières saw the principal function of diplomacy as moderating and managing the clash of conflicting interests as efficiently as possible. The diplomat was required to assess how the interests of his state, and the other state, could be met in terms acceptable to both.

One can see how remarkably similar this conception of diplomacy is to the way it is usually conceived today. Yet the world is remarkably different. The postwar establishment of new multilateral diplomatic machineries—the United Nations, NATO and the European Union—while creating new forums for state-to-state interactions, has not altered the fundamental idea that diplomacy is about states identifying their interests and arbitrating them with one another: that these interests and identities are susceptible to calculation. Indeed, these institutions are premised on the very notion that states can meet there and decide upon their common problems. It is therefore no surprise that diplomats tend to render the world and its myriad problems into these shapes. That this process is becoming more and more artificial, and disconnected from the reality of the forces at work in the world, is only now becoming evident enough to compel change.

The negative consequences of this kind of thinking can be clearly seen in negotiations over issues of common global concern, like climate change. Here, where a shared solution is clearly necessary and urgent, the habit of state-led thinking still dominates. While “world leaders” and UN officials pontificated about the lofty goals of the process, the negotiators in national delegations in the trenches of the conference resorted to type. Zero-sum bargaining over concessions and commitments dominated the discussions, with the usual rancor and finger-pointing when a deal—predictably—proved impossible to find. Some delegates suggested that the Earth’s atmosphere was divisible and that the industrialized nations had already taken their “share,” as if the atmosphere were a cake to be sliced up.

As the head of Greenpeace dejectedly stated at the dismal end of the Copenhagen summit: “It seems there are too few politicians in this world capable of looking beyond the horizon of their own narrow self-interest, let alone caring much for the millions of people who are facing down the threat of climate change,” he said. “It is now evident that beating global warming will require a radically different model of politics than the one on display here in Copenhagen.” He didn’t say what that model was, however.

Some would argue that the solution to this problem is to increase the number of supranational institutions like the European Union or the United Nations, where unelected officials chosen by the member states can somehow transcend the differences that bedevil nation states.

However, here too the outputs are disappointing. Again, we are confronted with a vast, confusing and obscure tableau of processes and groups and subgroups that pretend to solve common problems, from terrorist financing to avian flu and the Middle East peace process. It is clear that the existence of such processes can have in itself a debilitative effect: The mere existence of a “process” creates the erroneous impression that something is being done, when it is not.

The dysfunctional Copenhagen climate process is one example. Another, lesser known, is the “peace process” to resolve the illegal occupation of the Western Sahara. This “process” has lasted since the cease-fire in 1990 between the occupiers, Morocco, and the representatives of the indigenous people, the Sahrawis—twenty years and counting—when Morocco agreed to a referendum for the territory’s people to decide their status, an agreement and legal requirement endorsed many times by the “international community” at the UN. Every country in the world pretends to support this process, run by the UN, but none does anything in reality to advance it. The referendum has never taken place. In fact, the “process” is a way of shelving the issue indefinitely, to permit the existing status quo—of occupation. The process is thus a sham, the opposite of what it pretends to be.

Both the United Nations and the European Union have contributed enormously to limiting the twentieth-century scourge of international conflict. The EU has bound European countries together so tightly that war, once habitual, has now become unthinkable. The UN’s sixty-year existence has witnessed a steep decline in the interstate conflict prohibited by its charter. But in these successes, new weaknesses have emerged, not least in dealing with the more fluid and boundary-less problems of the twenty-first century. The UN Security Council was established to prevent wars between states. Today, not less than 80 percent of its agenda concerns issues involving nonstate actors, and conflicts both within and sometimes transcending states, like terrorism.[117]

Fatally, all such multilateral or supranational institutions suffer an irredeemable deficit of democratic legitimacy. The greater the distance between representative and elector, the less legitimate that representative. The UN Secretary-General is, at least in theory, supposed to represent us, but no one except the public is expected to believe that he does. The UN Secretary-General is well aware that it is the realpolitikers of the five permanent members of the Security Council who mail his paycheck every month, and he behaves accordingly, just as the president of the EU takes care to keep in close step with the major powers of the EU: France, the UK and Germany. I have often attended meetings between my ambassador at the UN and the Secretary-General where he would be told in unmistakable terms what party line he and his staff were required to toe. It didn’t have to be spelled out in threats, merely implied and hinted at. He invariably got the message.

For the ordinary citizen, institutions like the UN and the EU are even more impenetrable and opaque than their already distant national governments. I run a nonprofit diplomatic consultancy. Its staff works full-time to understand the world’s diplomatic and multinational institutions, and we find it difficult to work out who does what, and where real decisions are made. Pity the ordinary citizen seeking a hearing in the shiny but dismal corridors of the EU’s institutions in Brussels. Even for the acute, it is all but impossible to find out who is truly responsible for anything. It is reminiscent of nothing so much as the pathetic queues of provincial Chinese who make desperate but hopeless pilgrimage to Beijing to seek settlement of grievances against corrupt or incompetent Communist Party officials.

Moreover, but more subtly, the officials themselves are dangerously detached from the problem—and the people—they are seeking to arbitrate. I saw this in the UN Security Council—it was a curiously dry and boring place to work despite its dramatic agenda of genocide and civil war. The blood and emotion of these conflicts was absent in its discussions, and it was not a good absence: It was not conducive to better negotiation, but to worse. For one thing, the parties to the disputes on the council’s agenda were almost invariably absent from these deliberations—it is hardly a recipe for good decision making to ignore the views of those most concerned. Moreover, the emotional and moral content of events, so crucial to the motivation to solve such problems, was missing. Between the reality of the problems and our deliberations was a huge and unbridgeable divide, not only of actual distance—for we were usually many thousands of miles from the disputes we discussed—but of import.

These deficits are intrinsic to supranational institutions, just as the limits of nation-state thinking are inherent to the nation-state system, a system that has, since the Peace of Westphalia of 1648, dominated world affairs. Given these deficits, the answer to our global problems may not in fact be more diplomacy and international negotiation, at least not of the current kind. Thus conventional wisdom is turned on its head: We do not need more state-to-state diplomacy to solve these problems; we may, in fact, need less. And instead of relying on state-to-state diplomacy to manage the world, we must do so ourselves. As writer Parag Khanna has commented, “As was the case a millennium ago, diplomacy now takes place among anyone who is someone; its prerequisite is not sovereignty but authority.”

The deficits of the state-based system are commonly known, yet these systems endure, even when the operators of the system—my many and cynical diplomatic colleagues—have themselves ceased to believe in them. As they take the stand at public inquiries, or address the press, they can hardly believe that anyone still believes them. It is a hollow, hollow feeling and I know it. These systems will continue to endure until those in whose name they claim to function withdraw their consent. The pact is broken; it doesn’t work. To name a problem as “international” is to absolve oneself of responsibility and to place a solution in the hands of those proven manifestly incapable. The international is not international any more; it is simply us.

And here is the most insidious and yet hidden effect of the international system—of interstate diplomacy—as it currently exists. It is not that this system may exacerbate differences, force its players to define themselves more starkly than they otherwise might, nor that its exponents must naturally reflect a calculus not of the messy and diverse human family but of these strange and artificial units, states, or that these exponents are, as I once was, wholly separated from their sense of moral responsibility for their actions. These deficits are not the worst aspect of this system. (The “Live8” text messages to the G8 Summit provide a clue.)

The most dangerous effect of the system is not that it doesn’t work; it is that we, in whose name it is supposed to function, condone it, pretend to believe it contrary to all evidence and permit it to continue.[174]

It is one thing to accept this critique, but it is another to embody this philosophical shift. In a world of global terrorism, a rising India and China, and intense national competition for scarce resources, what meaningful action is available to the individual? How can the world be made to reflect its human reality rather than its inherited and inappropriate delineations of segregated states and peoples?

One obvious answer is for individuals to organize across nations and states around common causes. This is already beginning to happen: witness the global movements around climate change or the protection of human rights. (Ideas to guide such action will be more fully elaborated later.) Less encouragingly, such borderless cooperation is also visible in the transnational organization of drug trafficking or jihadist terrorism, where extremists of many different nationalities have gathered around the flag of the new Umma.

It is too easy to succumb to defeatism in regarding the world today—its weapons, its states, its self-serving and bumptious leaders. How on earth are we supposed to deal with that? It might be revealing to look at an issue that inspires the most pessimism and also the most horror. Nuclear weapons embody in their very existence the possibility of appalling destruction and indeed the annihilation of humanity as a species. In some ways, they manifest the gross inhumanity of the state system—that in order to defend the state, governments are prepared to use weapons that threaten the destruction not only of their own population, but the entire world’s.

The conventional answer to this problem has been to look to governments to get rid of nuclear weapons. Even the demonstrators massing on the streets waving banners ultimately urge their governments to respond. Is this a realistic ambition?

The 2010 review conference of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), the cornerstone of the world’s efforts to reduce nuclear weapons, lasted a month and involved highly skilled delegations from someone hundred ninety countries. The agreement they reached was lauded as a success, primarily because, unlike previous review conferences for the last decade, this gathering had actually achieved agreement. But the content of the agreement—the output—was feeble, despite the international atmosphere being its most propitious for decades.

As usual, the “outcome document” was long—twenty-eight jargon-laden and barely comprehensible pages—with a misleading sixty-four “action points,” most of which amount to no substantive action whatsoever. The vast majority are declarative: “reaffirming,” “welcoming” or “noting.” The press, focusing on one small part of the forest, made great play of the agreement to hold a conference—in the future—on a nuclear-free Middle East, but even that agreement left out the only country in the Middle East currently possessing nuclear weapons, Israel. Otherwise, the conference agreed merely to encourage the nuclear weapons states to make more concrete progress toward nuclear disarmament and reduce the use of nuclear weapons in their military doctrines; but attempts to make such disarmament concrete and obligatory through a nuclear weapons convention were fiercely resisted by the nuclear weapons states. As even the most favorable commentators put it, all that was agreed was a further process, not an output.[118]

In its closing statement, Cuba noted pointedly what the review conference had not agreed: no timetable on nuclear disarmament; no commitment to begin negotiations on a nuclear weapons convention; no clear commitment to stop the development of nuclear weapons; no call for withdrawal of nuclear weapons to home territories (i.e., out of Europe); and no legally binding negative security assurances—we shall come to these strange creatures later.

President Obama has declared his intention of ultimately ridding the world of nuclear weapons. The Global Zero campaign, supported by many prominent former statesmen and women and highlighted in a popular documentary film, Countdown to Zero, is advocating the same. But it is a fair bet that in the current state-based dispensation, these noble efforts will fail. For it is implausible to expect that China, or Russia, or even France or Britain, let alone Israel or Pakistan, will give up this ultimate guarantor of their security, even if some reductions may nevertheless be possible. As total arsenals go down, louder and louder will become the argument that nuclear weapons have successfully prevented mass conventional war between their possessors. It’s a plausible argument, as long as the proxy conventional wars that these powers fought on the territories of others are ignored. But nonetheless, the argument has force. Total disarmament relies on something that evidently does not exist—complete confidence and trust in the commitments of others that they too have disarmed irreversibly, and that they will not launch conventional attack.

The NPT’s answer to this problem is fundamentally ridiculous. To the non-nuclear states who demand assurance that they will not be the victim of nuclear attack, the nuclear weapons states (NWS) have offered “reverse security guarantees”—promises that they will not use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states in certain circumstances. The “progress” of the 2010 review conference was that the conference agreed to consider making these “guarantees” legally binding. In other words, if a nuclear weapons state dropped the bomb or bombs on a non-nuclear state, the victim state would be able to seek redress in an international court, presuming that there would remain—post-apocalypse—a government, lawyers or courts with which to press such a claim. And such legal obligations would arise only if the nuclear weapons states agree to them, which they have yet to do: At the review conference, they agreed only to “consider” them. Such reverse guarantees, even if legally enforceable, are unlikely to provide much reassurance if, for instance, Ukraine finds itself dealing with a fascist-led nuclear-armed Russia, which unfortunately is a more plausible prospect than the legally binding reverse security assurances.

Under the NPT, the UK, like all other declared nuclear-armed states, is in theory committed to disarm itself of all of its nuclear weapons. The NPT was founded on a conceptual bargain—that the rest of the world would not develop their own nuclear weapons capability, as long as the nuclear weapons states agreed to get rid of theirs, eventually. One indicator of the “progress” made at the 2010 conference was that the UK for the first time declared the full number of its nuclear weapons. No other declared NWS has done so. Revealingly but perhaps also most honestly, France insisted that the goal of the NPT “process” not be stated as a “world free of nuclear weapons,” but the creation of “conditions which will lead to a world free of nuclear weapons.”

Earlier that year, the U.S. and Russia agreed under the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or START, to a reduction in their arsenals of nuclear weapons. Heralded as offering substantial new reductions, some analysts judge that in reality the agreement barely affects the number of actual deployed weapons, and involves no reduction in the number of Russian launch vehicles.[119] Both powers continue to maintain hundreds of nuclear delivery systems at Cold War levels of alert: ready to be launched within a few minutes. One respected think tank noted that “while the operational readiness of some weapon systems has been reduced, there has been no major change in the readiness levels of most of the nuclear weapon systems in the post–Cold War era.”[120]

Instead, it is more plausible to refer to, reinforce and promote a reality that the diplomats, politicians and analysts refuse to contemplate. The calculus of nuclear weapons depends upon the existence of the chess board—a “Them” and an “Us.” If you attack me, I will attack you: black and white pieces, segregated and discrete. If those distinctions no longer exist, the game cannot be played. If instead of two distinct sets of pawns and pieces, clearly separated across the board, all pieces are but varying shades of gray, intermingled and spread all over the board. This depiction is much closer to the contemporary reality, and the more time passes, the more accurate it will become. A Pakistani attack on New Delhi would kill hundreds of thousands of Muslims. An attack on Israel would kill thousands of Arabs. Any use of nuclear weapons, more or less anywhere, would have devastating effects on a highly interlinked global economy. Destroying New York would kill people from every country on earth: people of more than ninety different nationalities were killed in the destruction of the twin towers; one borough of the city contains 174 different nationalities. Killing Them would mean killing Us.

Nuclear weapons make this doubly true as even a limited strike on one country would, according to recent research, imply appalling consequences for the whole planet. Studies have shown that even a “small-scale” nuclear exchange, say, India and Pakistan launching fifty weapons each against each other, would have devastating consequences not only for the countries directly targeted but for the global environment and potentially for the survival of mankind.[121] Thus, nuclear weapons are revealed in their true nature: not as weapons of deterrence or plausible utility, but as mankind’s suicide pill.

This truth is already slowly spreading among some enlightened members of the military, who are realizing that the use of nuclear weapons by states is basically implausible—and self-destructive—in almost any circumstance. The most likely people to use nuclear weapons are not states but suicidal millenarian terrorists. Osama bin Laden’s deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri has already written a book dismissing moral objections to the use of weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear weapons.[122] Our possession of nuclear weapons is no deterrent to such threats, but the very existence of nuclear weapons provides a possible method for these extremists. Thus, the best thing would be to do away with them altogether.

Establish this as a cultural truth, and eventually that understanding will filter through. Wherever possible, travel, interact, make love, argue, live with people elsewhere. Engage; co-mingle. Resist the efforts of governments and others to paint the Other in stark colors, whether black or white. Throw away the chessboard; cut the ground from under those who would pretend humanity is but chessmen. Cease using the outdated nomenclature of a world that is already receding into history; stop naming; stop dividing.

One surprising conclusion from this analysis might come as a shock to the antiglobalization protesters storming the next G8 Summit: What might be the most effective tactic ultimately to get rid of nuclear weapons is not less globalization, but more. The deeper the intermingling, the more dense the mesh connecting humanity, the less the chessboard may be clearly defined, the more absurd becomes the calculus of nuclear weapons, and indeed of states as discrete entities, themselves.

Interestingly, this reasoning also applies to other harmful, if less apocalyptic, forms of warfare. Many have expressed concern that China or Russia are able to launch devastating “cyber attacks” against Western institutions, and economic and financial infrastructure. But one Chinese official has reportedly dismissed this option, primarily on the grounds of China’s dependence on U.S. financial stability—China owns nearly a trillion dollars’ worth of securitized American government debt—a cyber attack on Wall Street would harm China as much as it harmed the U.S.[123]

These examples suggest that the antiglobalizers storming the G8-protecting riot police are precisely wrong.

Instead of conventional theories of government and international relations, we need a new set of tools—and perhaps a dose of humility too, for a complex world may defy all but a general understanding of its inherent and pervasive unpredictability and contingency. In fact, we need the tools that interpret complex systems.

Malcolm Gladwell has popularized the concept of the “tipping point,” the idea from complexity theory that even small events may trigger complex systems to “tip” over from one condition into another. Historian Niall Ferguson and others have begun to suggest that empires, such as the American “empire,” are complex systems and thus may be highly vulnerable to outside events, perhaps seemingly minor, over which they have little or no control, causing their downfall.[124] In finance, Nassim Nicholas Taleb has suggested that highly aberrational “black swan” events, hitherto regarded as extremely rare, are in reality much more frequent than predicted, and moreover have vastly more dramatic consequences. The May 2010 “flash crash” on the Dow Jones seemed to prove his point.

There is, then, a growing realization that human affairs make up in their totality a complex system. Complex systems share characteristics which have important but barely noted consequences for politics.

Complex systems are not chaotic. They are not simple and ordered, but neither are they an uncontrolled mess. Complex systems are instead something “in between,” as Professor Scott Page, an expert on complexity, has observed.[125]

Another characteristic is perhaps the most telling, and recollects the stadium wave or the suicide bomber. The actions of one individual may redound in very powerful and consequential ways. This insight is a conclusion completely at odds with contemporary notions of the ranking and power of government, state and individual. The individual is not powerless, not subordinate; in fact individuals are a potent agent of lasting change in the whole system.

If individuals begin to behave in the way suggested in this book—to act themselves to produce desired political results, cooperating and negotiating directly with others affected—then a new dispensation will emerge, something that we may not yet be able to describe. This is the phenomenon of “emergence,” a key characteristic of complexity: that from the combined actions of many agents, acting according to their own microcosmic preferences and values, a new condition may emerge from the bottom up, almost unconsciously, and certainly without imposition by government, god or anyone else.

Intellectually, we understand that turning a vast heterogeneous mesh into a chessboard of discrete players is to do something inherently reductive, oversimplifying and thus, in its way, deceptive if not downright dishonest. It is simply not possible credibly to claim that any authority, like any historian, can understand this huge pattern of interaction and connection. They cannot know, yet they must claim to.

Yet there is something still more insidious going on. In claiming authority to organize our affairs, to order the Pollack-like mélange into something that it isn’t, governments take away something more crucial from us—our own agency. Or rather, they take away our own sense of agency, for in truth our control over events never left us, only our belief in its existence.

Contrary to common assumptions, individuals acting collectively have a far greater power to control their circumstances, and indeed those of the whole world, than governments pretend. The immediate overthrow of governments now would bring only chaos. But as individuals and groups begin to assert their own agency over decisions and events within their own reach, there will eventually emerge a much wider and more fundamental effect, one that would ultimately amount to a revolution in how we organize our affairs.

How this might look is inherently unpredictable. No one can know how the sum of such deliberate actions might appear. This is, above all, a cultural change not an architectural redesign of political structures. Gustav Landauer, a nineteenth-century theorist, once wrote:

The state is not something which can be destroyed by a revolution, but is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of human behavior; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently.

It will start with individuals acting upon their convictions. It will continue and gather force as they join together—perhaps in person, perhaps on the Web—to organize, not to campaign, but to act and embody the changes they seek. These networks of cooperation may be temporary; they may be long-lasting. They may encompass a street, or the inhabitants of a building, cooperating to manage their affairs. They may span the globe as millions act together to address a shared concern. The embryonic forms of such cooperation are already evident: There are consumers cooperatives that bargain for lower prices; “common security clubs” where unemployed people share job-seeking skills, barter services and organize shared childcare;[126] local groups where unemployed handymen and babysitters offer their services to the community;[127] and Internet campaigns that enroll millions across the globe.

As the realization of governments’ dwindling power spreads, this new form of politics will become less about protest or petition and more about action. The sum of these collectives will not have a fixed structure; they will ebb and flow, responsive to the changing needs and passions of the population. They may be local, but they will also transcend borders, inevitably weakening the mental hold of boundaries and inherited national identities upon peoples with common interests. One day, so strong may be this new culture of collective collaboration, and this mesh of different networks of cooperation, that our existing institutions, based on the singularizing, centralizing unit of national government, and indeed the notion of the nation state, may wither away, unneeded, outdated, irrelevant.

This mesh of networks, of collaborating groups both local and transnational, represents in its indefinite shapes its dynamic changing nature and its responsiveness to the needs of its participants—us, ordinary people—a form much closer to the actual nature of the world today, its diverse and massive flows, the multiplying and shifting identities of its peoples, and above all its manifold challenges. And in its consonance with the nature of the world, that mesh, that shape—indeterminate, unstructured, changing though it may be—offers paradoxically much greater stability and coherence than the fixed and hierarchical forms of organization we have inherited from the past. The world should be ordered according to our needs, not the projections and requirements of static institutions.

The future nature of this world cannot be foreseen; it will emerge. But one thing is sure. No longer would we be fooled into seeing the world as a chessboard, demarcated, separated, neat, but instead it would seem to us as it really is.