This essay seeks to explain why the United States is struggling to deal with the “soft” cyberoperations that have been so prevalent in recent years: cyberespionage and cybertheft, often followed by strategic publication; information operations and propaganda; and relatively low-level cyber disruptions such as denial-of-service and ransomware attacks. The main explanation for the struggle is that constituent elements of U.S. society—a commitment to free speech, privacy, and the rule of law, innovative technology firms, relatively unregulated markets, and deep digital sophistication—create asymmetric weaknesses that foreign adversaries, especially authoritarian ones, can exploit. We do not claim that the disadvantages of digitalization for the United States outweigh the advantages, but we present reasons for pessimism.

Optimality and efficiency work counter to robustness and resilience. Complexity hides interdependence, and interdependence is the source of black swan events.  The benefits of digitalization are not
transitive, but the risks are.  Because single points of failure
require militarization wherever they underlie gross societal
dependencies, frank minimization of the number of such single points
of failure is a national security obligation.  Because cascade
failure ignited by random faults is quenched by redundancy, whereas
cascade failure ignited by sentient opponents is exacerbated by
redundancy, (preservation of) uncorrelated operational mechanisms
is likewise a national security obligation.

This paper concludes that the Chinese government has adopted a strict positivist reading of the UN Charter’s limitations on the use of force that brooks no exceptions for humanitarian interventions and with a narrowly construed exception for self defense. Since China has not shown any willingness to abandon this legal approach to the law of jus ad bellum codified in the Charter, it is unlikely that China will embrace the US legal approach to cyberwarfare. Rather, China will probably use its restrictive reading of the UN Charter to garner political support among other countries to criticize and deter offensive US cyberwarfare.  This sharp divide between the US and Chinese legal positions calls into question the efficacy of longstanding US government efforts to convince China to accept and apply international law to cyberwarfare.  

The global political, economic and financial landscape is constantly evolving. Some of the changes may prove short-lived. But others may be slow-moving and persistent, and only detectable over time as evidence accumulates. Although central banks’ day-to-day operations and policymaking tend to focus on near- or medium-term developments, longer-term trends and structural changes will at some point come into the picture – not least because of their impact on the economic relationships that are central to policy formulation and analysis.