“Cheap flights and ubiquitous worldwide communications are the stuff of globalization. Ready travel lets people oppressed at home taste the joys of free society, while the Net exposes them to the ideas and customs underpinning that social order. The effect is viral, spreading liberal values and economic growth to benighted dictatorships and hopeless pits of poverty. So it’s difficult to grasp that these two innovations might also be an imminent menace to Western civilization.”
His concern about ‘stateless aliens’ and ‘stage 4 warfare’ —
“At the first sign of weakness, these new-wave Vandals will log on to urge their diasporic compatriots to attack you on your own soil. Failing that, they’ll hop on the next flight, pick up their baggage, and sidle into Starbucks to download the latest instructions from Abu Ayyub al Masri.”
— is, somewhat paradoxically and, one might say inexplicably, counterbalanced by faith that we can ‘outthink the marauders’ and think of ways to reintegrate the Vandals.
