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against Sparta. The Melians - like poor Lin Zexu or Lobengula of the Matabele - yearned only to be left alone. “You would not agree to our being neutral, friends instead of enemies, but allies of neither side?” they asked?28. No, the Athenians replied, and then a line that has resonated through the problems of nations ever since: “It is the nature of power that he who has it takes; he who does not must submit.” The Melians voted stubbornly against surrender and for hope. Perhaps the Spartans would mount a relief raid? The Athenians might change their minds? Neither happened. The Melian men were betrayed and then massacred. Their wives and children were sold as slaves. What do networks do when they touch the balance of war and peace? How might we use what we know, what we sense, about a connected age to manage the dangers ahead? If an insane Cult of the Offensive flavored the end of the 19 Century, our own age vibrates, as we've seen, to a Cult of the Disruptive. The great tale of our times is the diffusion of a new, promising and disorienting network order. We've been told that all this interconnection makes war an impossibility. Everyone would be a loser in such a war. But the way in which that earlier age was so horribly wrong about the result of machines x weapons, should unnerve us. We don’t yet really know what networks x weapons means - to say nothing of networks x networks x weapons. Or, to sum up what we've seen so far in this book, very fast networks x artificial intelligence x black boxes x a New Caste x compression of time x everyday objects x weapons. Would you look at that weird formula and say conclusively: “Hey, we'll all get along.” Me neither. We should worry about the day we might face a Melian choice of our own, when some general or infomanagerial despot - or some clicking computer - shows up, unwelcome, and says to us: It should be obvious you are merely a node, and I control the network. When leaders label the rise of China or cyberweapons or terrorism or the decline of the US as the “main problem” of our age - and all of these have been designated as such by famous foreign policy figures -they are missing the revolutionary, uniting force that animates them all. Networks. Whether we are trying to slice apart the roots of the Islamic State or slow Russian territorial dreams or understand narco- economics or hedge-fund finance - connectivity touches and defines each problem. New and essential platforms for finance and biological data and artificial intelligence are emerging now, blossomed out of network connection. These ecosystems must be design, built, protected. All while the world we know kicks back around us, sometimes crumbling, sometimes fighting for its dear life. ] promised earlier that we'd apply the Seventh Sense to some practical problem, and the deadly test of war and peace is the one I'd like to consider now. The sharpest challenge of truth for any view of the world is, after all, the design of a grand strategy. Get it right and you can secure your Safety. The energy of the age can be your tool. Get it wrong and you reap the Somme, Melos, Canton, the Shangani. Recall General Liu Yazhou’s line: “A major 228 The Melians: Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, Steven Lattimore trans., (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1998) Chap 5.; See also the excellent BBC performance of certain elements of Thucydides in “The War That Never Ends” available on YouTube 155 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018387