Globalization and the information revolution are creating new community relationships that build upon, democratize, and magnify existing social frameworks.
The network allows ideas to compete and confers a competitive advantage on those most able to share, trade, and receive the most relevant information.
State Department officials may look gleefully at other foreign ministries and note that the United States is far ahead of its perceived counterparts in responding to globalization and the information revolution. These officials, however, do not recognize that competition is not coming from other states, but from other forms of organization altogether.
Power today is as much about promoting ideas and norms of behavior as it is about projecting military might.
By disaggregating the state foreign policy function into its component parts, it is possible to identify where greater integration into networks is feasible and desirable, and where the hierarchical structures of accountability can and should remain intact.
The very term "foreign policy" attempts to differentiate between "domestic" and "foreign" in ways that make less sense in a globalized network environment. Foreign policy is not foreign. It is global -- both domestic and foreign simultaneously.
The primary impediment to networked engagement is the culture of insularity and secrecy that pervades US foreign policy institutions.
Accountability should not be purchased at the cost of ignorance.
Understanding control as the ability to influence values and standards in a decentralized system, not as the need to maintain absolute authority over every component of the policy process, will pose a fundamental challenge to governments. The networked global environment of the information revolution, however, not only distributes control, but also punishes those who attempt to hoard information and rewards those who share it. In the Information Age, you have to give up control in order to get it back, but it returns in a different form. Old control was about hierarchy, monopoly, and aggregation. New control is about flexibility, decentralization, and networked specialization.
Open dialogue and the sharing of ideas should be goals in themselves. The United States must support and facilitate such dialogue, even when it is critical of the United States.
Conscious efforts must be made to shift government institutional culture from a focus on secrecy, information hoarding, and hierarchy to a system of openness, innovation, and information sharing.
Governments must change the way they do business to make their best voices heard in a networked world.
