Greg Austin wrote this piece for his weekly column in New Europe.

Niall Ferguson, with typical and magisterial sweep of history, has warned in a recent issue of Foreign Affairs, that empires collapse suddenly, not gradually. He suggests that the United States may now be on the edge of sudden collapse.

It is hard to divine the real meaning of the piece. Is he really saying that the United States is irreversibly on a path to sudden collapse because of imperial overstretch in foreign wars  or unrealistic expectations about future U.S. power in a fragile global economy. Or is he more intent on warning us about President Obama, who his article allegorically implies might be driving a train with a defective brake and who could be asleep in the locomotive. 

Either way, the article betrays an overdose of anxiety more typical of “fin de siècle” than barely ten years into the century. It is an anxiety I share, but not for the same reasons. Ferguson is right on the money when he draws our attention to complex systems and the capacities of the leaders. Where we part company is in our choice of metaphors and understanding of where the power lies. We are, I am afraid, well past the age of railroads (about 100 years). We are also not in an age where the fate of the United States lies exclusively in the hands of its President (was it ever?).

One of the principal characteristics of our era is the heavy dependence on dispersed and diverse digital networks for almost everything we need: food, water, medicines, electric power and economic productivity. This is complexity of interdependence on a scale that has not yet entered the history books. If ever there was to be an “empire collapse” in the United States, this is certainly the area where I would be looking for the first signs.

There are two dimensions. The first is the increasing divergence between the virtual economy and the real economy. This was one of the elements that fed into the global economic crisis of the recent past.  The ability of digital systems to support new and ever more complex ways of speculating on the real economy divorces expectations of wealth from likely real world outcomes, in large part because of heightened risk that is harder and harder to manage. The complexity simply puts the activity beyond the scope of the humanly manageable accounting systems and law. Who really understands what happened two years ago? There are many theories, most are contested.

The second dimension has much less to do with social philosophy and the emerging weakness of our legal system in the face of digital accounting complexity. This second dimension concerns the basic security of our automated information systems and the geographically dispersed networks and nodes on which our modern society depends. Cybersecurity!! There is considerable cause to be worried.

The vulnerabilities are massive. They have been documented extensively by leading international organizations, national governments and private business. The response to the documented challenges has been far from adequate. Work by the EastWest Institute and others in this field has revealed two major causes: lack of political will (= lack of awareness) and the inadequacy of commercial incentives to move towards higher standards of security.  The inadequacy of the responses globally, nationally and in homes and businesses is a phenomenon worth understanding in itself. Because our cyber defences are so vulnerable, and our digital daily order so unprotected, we see a new trend emerging – that of cyber “insecurity”, “cyber fear” or “cyber angst’.

It is this factor which is now impeding meaningful progress in international collaboration on cybersecurity. If we want Americans, Russians and Chinese to sit together to work out mutually supportive security arrangements for the digital world order – and there are none – then they first need to understand the depth of their sense of cyber insecurity. Key steps in overcoming a sense of insecurity – cyber-induced or other – is proper self-valuation of strengths and resilience; discussions and negotiations with others about shared interests; and confidence building measures that can eventually lead to agreed defensive measures for common security, with legal norms to underpin a new cyber order.

Cyber angst can no longer be an excuse for lack of forward movement on new and effective action for common defence.

* Filed from Dallas, location of the EastWest Institute’s Worldwide Cybersecurity Summit, 3-5 May 2010.