The Foreign Service Journal, April 2017

38 APRIL 2017 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL strated that American and European security is indivisible. The United States cannot pivot away from Europe any more than a tree can pivot away from the soil in which it is rooted. We are constituent parts of one another in ways that we are not with any other part of the world. Writing in 1943, during the depth of World War II, Walter Lippmann suggested in American Foreign Policy, Shield of the Republic that an Atlantic alliance would be the best founda- tion for postwar governance: “The original geographic and historic connections across the Atlantic have persisted. The Atlantic Ocean is not the frontier between Europe and the Americas. It is the inland sea of a community of nations allied with one another by geography, history and vital necessity. . . . There is a great community on this earth from which no member can be excluded and none can resign. This community has it geo- graphical center in the great basin of the Atlantic.” In a sense, Lipmann was only elaborating on something Alexis de Tocqueville had writ- ten more than a century earlier in Democracy in America . There de Tocqueville argued that Europe and America “can never be independent of each other, so numerous are the natural ties which exist between their wants, their ideas, their habits and their manners.” A Pointer to the Future So what does this all mean for the future? It means that Europe and North America have already joined into one com- munity, dubbed “Transatlantica” by German management guru Hermann Simon. We may often disagree, but we will never break up. Only this time, the task will not be rebuilding Atlantic security, but rather to define a new sort of “global Atlantic” that can help ensure that Western principles guide the new era of digitalization—a task as fundamental to our future prosperity as was the recovery following World War II. During the past 20 years the world has slipped rapidly, almost without notice, into a new digital and globalized era. The world of formal structures, the world of hierarchical methods of man- agement, the world of nonporous national borders has disap- peared, without most of us even knowing what was happening. The existing treaty-based world order is being turned on end faster than any dictator could have done in the past. The U.S. National Intelligence Council’s 2004 Global Trends Report, “Mapping the Global Future,” described globalization—a growing interconnectedness reflected in the expanded flows of information, technology, capi- tal, goods, services and people throughout the world—as “an overarching ‘mega-trend,’ a force so ubiquitous that it will substantially shape all the other major trends in the world of 2020.” Western values now domi- nate the software of this system, but those values also unnerve leaders in countries such as Russia and China. Freedom of information and civil society challenge the influence of authoritarian regimes as no military alliance could ever do. They are already fighting back, as we learned during our recent election campaign. So unless “Transatlantica” finds a new sense of common purpose as a “global Atlantic” to manage the challenges of globalization, we may not be able to ensure that Western values of openness, freedom and tolerance will continue to define the operating system of the digitalized world. The unprecedented challenges brought about by globaliza- tion and digitalization make almost irrelevant our demands that Europe pay a bigger share for the defense of the West, or that new bilateral trade agreements replace multilateral efforts such as TTIP. Digitalization is extending the battlefield to a new glob- ally integrated domain where national interests and projection of power will be defined more by dynamics within networks than by the behavior of individual actors. Mastering these challenges will be as complex and impor- tant to the survival of democracy as was winning the Cold War. Europe cannot manage this new industrial revolution without America, and America should not want to manage it without Europe. n Unless “Transatlantica” finds a new sense of common purpose to manage the challenges of globalization, we may not be able to ensure that Western values of openness, freedom and tolerance will continue to define the operating system of the digitalized world.