In their book, The Future of Violence, Benjamin Wittes and Gabriella Blum point out that one of the things that made the Roman empire so powerful was its amazing network of paved roads. This network made it easy to move armies relatively quickly. But it also made it possible to move goods around, too, and so Roman logistics were more efficient and dependable than anything that had gone before. Had Jeff Bezos been around in AD125, he would have been the consummate road hog. But in the end, this feature turned out to be also a bug, for when the tide of history began to turn against the empire, those terrific roads were used by the Goths to attack and destroy it.

In a remarkable new paper, Jack Goldsmith and Stuart Russell point out that there’s a lesson here for us. “The internet and related digital systems that the United States did so much to create,” they write, “have effectuated and symbolised US military, economic and cultural power for decades.” But this raises an uncomfortable question: in the long view of history, will these systems, like the Roman empire’s roads, come to be seen as a platform that accelerated US decline?

I think the answer to their question is yes. North Korea provides a good case study in this context. The country may be a disaster zone economically but it has shown great strategic insight in its pivot to cyber-operations. Kim Jong-un and his cronies have understood how digital technology can convert industrial and economic weakness into a strength.

“The reason why major industrialised countries hold back from responding in kind to one another’s cyber attacks,” I argued last year, “is because their societies are all desperately dependent on complex, fragile and insecure network infrastructures. So all fear the unfathomable consequences of retaliation.”

Thus, one of the paradoxical side-effects of digital technology is the emergence of striking asymmetries of power. As Goldsmith and Russell point out, this has two dimensions. The first is the obvious one of acute technological dependence. On the one hand, advanced industrial countries such as the US, the UK, Russia, France and China possess formidable arsenals of cyber-weapons. On the other hand, they are reluctant to use them because their societies are critically reliant on complex digital infrastructures that are poorly defended and vulnerable to external attack. These vulnerabilities have been regularly on show in the last few years: think of the WannaCry ransomware attacks on the NHS, innumerable large data breaches, massive denial-of-service attacks and so on.

Or think of the ease with which the Democratic National Committee was hacked in the US (on which a senior FBI official commented: “These DNC guys were like Bambi walking in the woods, surrounded by hunters. They had zero chance of surviving an attack. Zero”).

The New York Times journalist to whom those remarks were addressed, David Sanger, has recently published a sobering new book, The Perfect Weapon, in which he points out that cyber-weapons are cheap (and easy to acquire). So not having a complex digital infrastructure can suddenly give small countries an edge over the big boys. These new adversaries don’t have to worry about devastating retaliation.

The US could easily cripple every networked device in North Korea, for example, but if it did, life for most of that country’s wretched inhabitants would continue as usual. The reverse is not true. Advanced industrial societies now run on just-in-time logistics. Supermarkets have to close if supplies are delayed by more than three days. Social unrest follows soon after that. As we saw from the fuel depot closures in the UK, few democratic governments are willing to take that risk, even if some Brexiters are.

The second dimension of democracies’ disadvantages in this arena, Goldsmith and Russell argue, is moral or ethical rather than technological. Western commitments to free speech, privacy, the rule of law, free media, allowance of non-state corporations and relatively unregulated markets create “asymmetrical vulnerabilities” that foreign adversaries, especially authoritarian ones, can exploit. These are features of democracies that the populist authoritarians among us, many of whom suffer from dictator-envy, regard as bugs. But even liberals who treasure these values have to acknowledge that they leave us fighting cyber-offensives with one hand tied behind our backs.

Goldsmith and Russell are writing about the US, but much of what they say applies to every western democracy. We have arrived at a strange and uncomfortable place where our formidable technical sophistication may actually be our achilles heel. Our spooks and cybersecurity experts are acutely aware of the threats. But the rest of us seem blissfully unaware of the danger as we choose “password” for the default password of our latest networked gizmos. The Greeks used to say that those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad. And, as the Goths discovered, all roads lead to Rome.

What I’m reading

How the Blog Broke the Web
This is the title of a quirky but lovely piece by Amy Hoy, who laments the way that tools such as Movable Type and Blogger drained all the creativity out of blogging. Manages to stay just the right side of nostalgia.

AI and medicine
An interesting new blog has been started by trainee radiologist Luke Oakden-Rayner.

Getting to the roots of Trump’s psychosis about Obama
If you’re puzzled by why Donald Trump nurses such a visceral hatred of his predecessor, this video of the former president’s 2011 White House correspondents’ dinner explains all.