In mid-December, the Council on Foreign Relations sponsored a virtual roundtable with Joseph Nye, - former dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, - to discuss his recent Foreign Affairs article The End of Anarchy?: How to Build a New Digital Order. Professor Nye has long been regarded as one of America’s preeminent strategic thinkers and political scientists. In the 1970s he chaired the National Security Council Group on Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons, and over the past decade he’s brought his expertise to the study of conflict and deterrence in cyberspace.
Cybersecurity is an increasingly important aspect of the of US national security strategy, including global trade and the protection of our critical infrastructures. In June of 2021, FBI Director Christopher Wray compared the danger of ransomware attacks on US firms by Russian criminal groups to the September 11 terrorist attacks. And, in a July editorial, the NY times said that ransomware attacks have emerged as “a formidable potential threat to national security,” given “their ability to seriously disrupt economies and to breach strategically critical enterprises or agencies,” urging governments that “It is a war that needs to be fought, and won.”
At an MIT conference in February of 2019, former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was asked if we need cybersecurity control agreements with Russia, China and other nations similar to the nuclear arms control agreements that he spent so much time negotiating during the Cold War. Dr. Kissinger replied that for arms control to be effective, the two sides needed to share information and agree to inspections. But such mechanisms are harder to apply in the digital world, because the transparency that was essential for arms control would be very hard to establish for cyber threats. In addition, while controls of physical arms are relatively explicable and negotiable, the variety and speed of cyber attacks make it much harder to develop adequate control agreements.
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