The Age of the Unthinkable (26 page)

One way to make this contrast between direct and indirect is to return to Richard Nisbett’s lab at the University of Michigan,
where he conducted those eye-movement studies with American and Chinese students. Let’s imagine for a moment how the American
students might have conducted a war if asked. We can probably assume they’d bring their same ogling instincts to war fighting.
They’d stare right at what seemed to matter most and then hit at it hard. They would direct 90 percent of their force to where
their eyes were 90 percent of the time: the center of the picture. This was the same sensibility that animated Clausewitz’s
“battering ram” battle tactics. This approach reflected not only his own experience of European combat, with its history of
head-to-head fights, but also something much more profound: the basic idea that outcomes are usually determined by direct
collision, whether it be armies (think of the trench-to-trench stare-downs of World War I) or ideas (the yea-nay debates of
Con-gress or university students). As the French scholar François Jullien observed in his a masterful study of Western and
Eastern ways of thinking,
Detour and Access,
this idea is an extension of some of the deepest concepts of our culture, rooted in the Socratic notion that batting ideas
back and forth, slamming them together like Athenian and Spartan armies, would yield the fastest route to truth. You can find
this instinct at work not only in those “let’s talk it out” Camp David summits but also in television courtroom dramas, political
debates, and even the quotidian discussions around your kitchen table about when the teenager should be allowed to drive or
where you should go on vacation. Direct confrontation with problems is more than a habit of Western culture; in many ways,
it is a defining trait.

But what would happen if, for a moment, you looked at the world as those Chinese students in Nisbett’s lab did? What if you
asked them to plan a war? Recall that they believed the environment mattered more than the central image. This was why their
eyes constantly moved from place to place, taking in the
context
of an image. Such a view produces a very different logic of action, one that sees us and our aims as only one part of a larger
system (whether it is the Middle East or global financial markets) instead of as the center. If you can understand and master
the environment around your enemy, you can indirectly manipulate him, which is far more effective — and inescapable — than
trying to persuade or confront him directly. It would be like making it rain on the day someone has a picnic planned instead
of trying to talk or argue her out of it. Manipulation of the environment in this way is faster, in a sense, and more reliable
than persuasion — a fact as true for dealing with Iran as for picnickers or tumors. But this demands making contact with and
using the whole system. “Sometimes the river is running east, sometimes it is running west,” a Chinese aphorism goes. An effects-based
manipulation strategy means knowing which way the river is running, then forcing your opponent to battle upstream. Sun Zi,
the Chinese military strategist believed to have lived twenty-five hundred years ago, locked up this instinct in his writing,
which was obsessed with avoiding direct collision. In this, he was as much a product of his indirect culture as Clausewitz
was of his direct one. Much of ancient Chinese philosophy suggested that truth emerged not through debate but rather through
study, reflection, meditation, and, at long last, insight delivered like lightning. Collisions, whether of ideas or armies,
were seen as wasteful and inelegant.

The question for Sun Zi was how you might make the outcome of a battle inevitable
and
avoid collision. It was far better, in this view, to attack your enemy’s strategy instead of his troops. If you could immobilize
him at the level of his neural cortex, he would collapse. If you could force him to go east when the river was running west,
then nature would exhaust him far more efficiently than you ever could. Hundreds of years before any substantial discussion
of “effects-based” strategies could be heard within the Pentagon’s inner ring, Sun Zi was articulating a way of war in which
the ideal wasn’t simply fewer collisions but none at all. “For a man who is expert at using his troops,” Sun Zi wrote, “the
course of a battle may be likened to making round stones roll down from the highest summit.” Chinese writers would praise
masters of this gravitational skill by saying they had found a way to “open a ten-ton door with a one-ounce key.” American
generals, meanwhile, would be requisitioning ever-bigger battering rams.

What we must do now is start to extend this logic to all the problematic, indirect fights ahead of us: stemming financial
panic, stopping the spread of nuclear weapons, or any other number of shape-shifting dangers. How can we surround, contain,
and choke all those perils that can’t be confronted directly? Well, we must master this idea of using the environment — of
shaping and designing it for our use. The question isn’t, for example, “How do we handle Russia’s belligerent plans?” but
“How do we create an environment that gives us the leverage we need to manipulate Moscow?”

This is a leap, to be sure. But the very success of such a strategy is why you might find the Chinese reminding you that “the
greatest generals who ever lived, we don’t even know their names.” As Jullien explains, they’re unknown to us because they
never had to fight a single battle. Their sense of the terrain, of their environment, allowed them to create effects so profound
and irresistable that they mooted the need for actual combat. They challenged that old line about diplomacy being “the art
of the possible” with the idea that it should be the science of the inevitable. In this sense, Chinese often find the Western
Odyssean narrative of the lone idealist battling an implacable environment baffling, as perplexing as a boat trying to run
east in a west-running river. “One who is courageous and filled with derring-do will be killed,” Lao Zi, the Chinese philosopher
once wrote. “One who is courageous and not daring will live.” Chinese heroes were heroic because they got what they wanted
and
lived.

Chinese hero warriors are not like Pericles or Patton, marked largely by brilliance in bloody combat. Instead, they are recalled
as sagelike. They do as little as possible. They prefer dominating instinct to titanic strength. They manipulate foes into
positions from which there is no sensible release
.
And to do this they are ceaselessly generating options, as Holling’s ideal ecosystem managers might, creating new ways to
think, clever ways to act. Looking back at our own policy failures in places like Rwanda or Myanmar or the credit-swap markets,
we must ask the question that obsessed those rebellious post-Vietnam pilots: “What should we have done differently?” One of
the first things you realize when you do ask is that there were often no good answers at the time because there were no options.
Our engagement with the world was so narrow that we neglected the tools of manipulation we’d need: people to call and rely
on, government forces trained and suited for the challenges they faced. The question for Rwanda, for example, isn’t only what
you would have done differently as a massacre began to unfold there in 1995; it is also what you should have done five or
ten years earlier to establish a context of influence so that you wouldn’t have to rely only on a persuasive phone call to
convince madmen to stop killing. Indian and Pakistani nuclear proliferation offered a similar reminder that earlier, and far
more aggressive, shaping of the environment would have been far better than waiting to react to an Indian bomb test. Relationships
and tools that can be used to manipulate a crisis have to be prepared years — sometimes decades — in advance. This reflects
Holling’s belief that in a changing ecosystem the persistence of relationships matters more than anything else. That’s a reason
that reacquiring the habits of international cooperation in everything from food aid to nuclear energy is so essential. It
lets us begin to rebuild the webs of contacts, influence, and leverage to shape the environment around problems that we’ll
never be able to attack directly.

It’s important, of course, not to reduce Chinese thought to a cliché. (In fact, to stereotype Chinese strategic thought as
shaped only by peaceful, do-little Taoist perspectives is dangerous. Read MacArthur.) There’s plenty of Chinese literature
about trapping and killing your opponents. China, in its 3,500-year history, has not been a country filled only with polite,
tea-drinking, Go-playing scholar-generals, blithely surrounding one another in bloodless checkmates. And, in fact, that’s
the point. The unimaginably murderous violence of ancient Chinese life — particularly in the Spring and Autumn Period and
then the Warring States Period, 2,500 years ago — produced a philosophy obsessed with avoiding collision, with using effects
instead of arms. The dream of an indirect victory was to eschew wasteful, costly engagements. To Western eyes, the work of
Confucius or Mencius sometimes seems to say weirdly little about abstract ideas like justice or virtue and a great deal about
the demands of pure survival. But some of the most successful deep-security accomplishments of our own age come from exactly
this sort of approach, views that by necessity accept that our world is a system to be manipulated and not a
schwerpunkt
to be hammered. You can feel the puzzling, paradoxical potential of such a way of living by taking a moment to contemplate
this one thought of Sun Zi, which does take a moment to sink in: “He who does not engage in battle is likely to defeat the
enemy.”

One morning in the summer of 2008, an American computer programmer named Dan Kaminsky was poking around the very deepest parts
of the Internet as he sat in bed at home in Seattle. Kaminsky was already a legend of sorts among computer hackers, the geeky
subculture of serious gearheads who spent much of their lives with their brains plugged into the network of fiber optics,
servers, and PCs that has exploded around the world over the past twenty years. Kaminsky was twenty-nine and well regarded
both by the “white-hat” hackers — the good guys who used their knowledge of networks to make them stronger — and by the “black
hats,” who spent time looking for holes in the Internet for less socially redeeming (though often very profitable) reasons.

To the degree that Kaminsky had an expertise, it was in a part of the infrastructure of the Net known as Domain Name Services,
or DNS, which is one of the crucial behind-the-scenes technologies that keeps the Internet running. Kaminsky is pretty much
right out of central casting for such a role: nerdy, given to silly jokes, enthusiastic beyond belief about technical details
that are incomprehensible to all but a handful of people. But he also has an undeniable charm, one that has made him a hit
keynote speaker at the big hacker conventions. DNS servers (servers are special computers on the network that “serve” data
from one machine to another) hold master lists of the names of every location on the Net. You might think of them as giant
real-time telephone books, since part of what they do is look up addresses and then match a request you’ve put in to your
computer with the machine on the Internet that you are looking for. When you type
www.joshuaramo.com
into your Web browser, it’s a DNS lookup machine that finds the much more complicated numerical address and then does the
business of helping the data get to your machine. If something went wrong with DNS, the implications for the Web would be
immense, as if telephone numbers no longer matched the people you were trying to dial.

That morning Kaminsky had spotted a quirk in the way the system worked that, he immediately realized, could be fatal. The
flaw had to do with the way those lists of names and addresses were maintained — in particular, a kink in the way the lists
were saved and updated (called “caching” in computer-speak) that would allow a crafty hacker to redirect your request away
from the address you wanted to anywhere they chose. If you were trying to access your bank account, for instance, this DNS
hack could direct you instead to another Web site that looked exactly like your bank’s (as far as you could tell) but was
really a shill that would steal your account information, password, and other details. This was called “cache poisoning,”
and it would have made stealing personal information incredibly easy; in most cases users would have little idea what had
happened until it was far too late. Worse, Kaminsky realized this hole had been built into the system as a
feature —
in other words, someone had designed the most fundamental part of the Internet with a giant, unintentionally open door. “It’s
really good,” he later said of the hole. “Which in our business means it’s very, very bad.” Almost every computer in the foundation
layer of the Internet probably had the same DNS flaw. If you tried to fix them one by one it would take an infinite amount
of time, and you’d end up alerting the very hackers you were trying to keep from discovering the flaw in the first place.
A stunned Kaminsky called his girlfriend, also a programmer, and in a combination of sheepishness and pride confessed, “Honey,
I broke the Internet.”

Kaminsky knew he was racing against time. His first reaction was to check that he was right. To do this he made a few discreet
calls to some of the architects of the Web, most of whom knew him by reputation as a very good security analyst. Within hours
they confirmed that the cache-poisoning threat was real. That left them all staring at the same dilemma: Kaminsky had uncovered
a giant weakness, but the moment they announced it or even discussed it, they would be putting up a sort of “attack here”
sign. If hackers discovered the flaw, they might be able to close down large portions of the Internet, a catastrophe people
knew was possible but never thought would actually happen. So Kaminsky and his colleagues were faced with a very scary problem.
A direct approach to the cache-poisoning dilemma — announcing it and posting a fix — would have been like group suicide. So
they began hunting, furiously, for an indirect way out.