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five. This record appeared to have had little impact on the nation’s dominant global position; it did little to unnerve a comfortable sense of national destiny. Much of our current confidence can be measured by the astonishing degree to which we embrace the scrambling of even the most elemental parts of our lives, from how we bank to how we drive. Most societies in the past were largely terrified of disruption. If you had arrived in prosperous 17 century Holland and proposed to “disrupt agriculture,” or radically change people’s banking habits, you would have been lynched. Our age is different. Many of the most unsettling forces in our world are ones we encourage, feed and push along. If | had said to you a decade ago - “I’m going to record all of your movements so you can spend less time in traffic.” - is that really a deal you would have accepted? But if you use a GPS mapping system on your phone, you have. That Orwell's sick prognostication of technocratic life would be one you'd embrace? That it would describe a desireable feature of network life? “You had to live - did live, from habit that became instinct - in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and ... every movement scrutinized.”*° If I had told you we were going to build a world wide high-speed data system that would, as a side effect, make it simple for children in London to connect with, learn from and then join terrorists in Syria - would you have thought that wise? The optimistic bumper sticker of our age - that any disruption is good disruption - marks a wonderful feature of the American character. It is, perhaps, to be expected of a nation built by immigrants who overturned their own lives in the hopes of something better. To pull up and leave home for a land where you did not speak the language, knew little of the culture, and faced a blank sheet of the future, demanded faith. You had to believe too: Any disruption is good disruption. But no nation, even the most heroically hopeful, is immune from the forces of history. Edmund Burke’s old line, that “every revolution contains within it the seeds of evil,” runs like a counterpoint through the hopeful music of the age now. America’s remarkable spirit does not make the demand for a national outlook, for an American grand strategy, any less real. We're starting to be aware of just how dangerous this age can really be. In many ways, our very confidence and sometimes blindly certain feeling of destiny probably makes it even more essential that we have a sense, as we rest in Silicon Valley or Iowa or wherever, of where we are going, and why. The phrase “grand strategy” is one that carries a particular meaning when we think about problems of global balance. It means the way in which all of a nation’s powerful tools of economics, finance, ideology, politics, and other resources can be used, together, in the service of security and prosperity.5! To get the terms right, we 50 “You had to live”: George Orwell, 1984, Signet Classic Edition (New York: Signet Press, 1961), 3 51 The phrase: For a good general introduction to the problems of grand strategy B.H. Liddell Hart, Strategy, (New York: Faber & Faber, 1967); Paul Kennedy, ed., Grand Strategies in War and Peace (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991); Edward N. Luttwak, Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace (Cambridge, Mass:.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1987); Peter Paret with Gordon A. Craig 43 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018275