with little useful warning, and anyhow with a merciless and unstoppable efficiency. Connected, surprising terrorism has cost trillions to fight; linked-up network businesses have demolished, surely and even gladly, trillions of dollars of old profit sources with their cold, clicking efficiency. Skype blitzes hundreds of billions of dollars of long distance telephone profits, for instance. And replaces it with free. Amazon, in the space of a few years, cripples marketplace ideas built at the cost of trillions of dollars. The world we're entering into now, one of constant, sensor-filled data streams that give us areal-time feeling for everything from the temperature of your car before you get in to the pace of your heart as you sleep, means the potent, network forces of our day are not “blind” as Morgenthau’s states were, but gifted with an exactness of vision. They see everything, always, more than we or our leaders do. They see it constantly. They never forget. Networks seem to have an irresistible and amazing energy that impels them to find and then exploit pin-holes. Think of Al-Qaeda coolly regarding the American airline network in 2000, for instance. Or rising powers now poking at weaknesses in the international order that we've not yet begun to consider, let alone patch up. Whether confronting mobs of network-organized terrorists or cascades of computer error, we often discover the unnerving truth that on these connected systems there is no plug to pull. Networks of one sort or another are hardly new in international affairs, even if the sheer scale and speed of our modern systems is totally, revolutionarily fresh. The spiderwebbed tendrils of the Ganges River, for instance were a network that fed the Mughal Empire in the 16" and 17" centuries.”* The Yangtze and the Yellow and the Mekong river systems each marked out vital webs that carried wealth and knowledge into a half-dozen, spectacularly rich Chinese dynasties. Egypt and Mesopotamia developed great powers