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April 23rd, 2024 | 10:54 PM ET

Getting Ahead of the Problem

Posted: August 25th, 2015

By Admiral James Stavridis (Ret.)

Admiral Stavridis (Ret.) was the 16th Supreme Allied Commander at NATO and 12th Dean of The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, where he earned a PhD in international affairs.  He is currently Vice Chair, Global Affairs and Managing Director at The Carlyle Group and Chair of the Board of the Rockefeller Foundation.

In 1915, the British poet Thomas Hardy wrote a short masterpiece about the sinking of Titanic, which had occurred several years earlier. He describes the long string of separate events by which both the ship and the iceberg are formed – one in a shipyard and the other in the sea.  The climax of the poem is the collision and destruction of the ship; but the real point of the work is how all the industrial might and hubris of the industrial age was unaware of a malignant force slowly growing in shape, form, and destructive power.  In Hardy’s words:

And as the smart ship grew

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