The discontinuous spatiality of the contemporary nation-state
It is most interesting and very revealing that the U.S. government chose to use Bucky's Dymaxion Map to display this strategically vital information. This map is the most accurate representation of the "Whole Earth System". Government officials know this, yet our children are being introduced to this in school. What gives? It's the 21st century version of the "Great Pirate" scenario that Bucky describes in his Operating Manual. (GW)
WikiLeaks Guide/Critical Infrastructure
By Geoff Manaugh
Domus 948
June 2011
Mapping the discontinuous spatiality of the contemporary nation-state through the publication of the secret government memo listing 259 facilities around the world considered crucial to everyday life in the US
This article was published in Domus 948, June 2011
The Hit List
We might say with only slight exaggeration that the United States exists in its current state of economic and military well-being due to a peripheral constellation of sites found all over the world. These far-flung locations—such as rare-earth mines, telecommunications hubs and vaccine suppliers—are like geopolitical buttresses, as important for the internal operations of the United States as its own homeland security.
However, this overseas network is neither seamless nor even necessarily identifiable as such. Rather, it is aggressively and deliberately discontiguous, and rarely acknowledged in any detail. In a sense, it is a stealth geography, unaware of its own importance and too scattered ever to be interrupted at once.
That is what made the controversial release by WikiLeaks, in December 2010, of a long list of key infrastructural sites deemed vital to the national security of the United States so interesting. The geographic constellation upon which the United States depends was suddenly laid bare, given names and locations, and exposed for all to see.
The particular diplomatic cable in question, originally sent by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to all overseas embassies in February 2009 and marked for eventual declassification only in January 2019, describes what it calls "critical foreign dependencies (critical infrastructure and key resources located abroad)". These "critical dependencies" are divided into 18 sectors, including energy, agriculture, banking and finance, drinking water and water treatment systems, public health, nuclear reactors and "critical manufacturing." All of these locations, objects or services, the cable explains, "if destroyed, disrupted or exploited, would likely have an immediate and deleterious effect on the United States". Indeed, there is no back up: several sites are highlighted as "irreplaceable".
Specific locations range from the Straits of Malacca to a "battery-grade" manganese mine in Gabon, Africa, and from the Southern Cross undersea cable landing in Suva, Fiji, to a Danish manufacturer of smallpox vaccine. The list also singles out the Nadym Gas Pipeline Junction in Russia as "the most critical gas facility in the world".
The list was first assembled as a way to extend the so-called National Infrastructure Protection Plan (NIPP)—which focuses on domestic locations—with what the State Department calls its Critical Foreign Dependencies Initiative (CFDI). The CFDI, still in a nascent stage—i.e. it consists, for now, in making lists—could potentially grow to include direct funding for overseas protection of these sites, effectively absorbing them into the oblique landscape of the United States.
Of course, the fear that someone might actually use this as a check list of vulnerable targets, either for military elimination or terrorist sabotage, seemed to dominate news coverage at the time of the cable's release. While it is obvious that the cable could be taken advantage of for nefarious purposes—and that even articles such as this one only increase the likelihood of this someday occurring— it should also be clear that its release offers the public an overdue opportunity to discuss the spatial vulnerabilities of US power and the geometry of globalisation.
In identifying these outlying chinks in its armour, the United States has inadvertently made clear a spatial realisation that the concept of the nation-state has changed so rapidly that nations themselves are having trouble keeping track of their own appendages.
Seen this way, it matters less what specific sites appear in the WikiLeaks cable, and simply that these sites can be listed at all. A globally operating, planetary sovereign requires a new kind of geography: discontinuous, contingent and non-traditionally vulnerable, hidden from public view until rare leaks such as these.
Geoff Manaugh, blogger
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