Thinking beyond states.

• Author: Bremmer, Ian

WHEN GOVERNMENT officials formulate foreign policy, they tend to focus their analytical resources on the opportunities and challenges created by other governments: They coordinate policy with some states in order to overcome resistance from others. Officials at the State Department, for example, may soon be working to persuade allied countries to join the United States in a boycott of trade with Iran. The Pentagon, meanwhile, used its latest Quadrennial Defense Review to emphasize the security threats posed by the growth of China's military and the actions of "rogue states" like Iran, North Korea, Syria and others. In other words, states focus almost all their attention and analysis on the capabilities and intentions of other states.

There is an exception to this rule. Four years ago, the world learned that a small terrorist organization sheltered by an outlaw regime could dispatch a handful of men to strike a heavy blow against even the most powerful states. Terrorist networks also feature prominently in the U.S. defense review, and America is hardly the only country that spends substantial national security resources on the study of transnational terrorism.

Yet state governments have hardly begun to respond to the political and economic challenges posed by substate actors that do not directly threaten their security--or by those that do not represent a security threat at all. Multinational corporations, state-owned enterprises, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and even the people we have come to call "super-empowered individuals" have a great and growing role in international relations--and an enormous potential impact on the ability of states to pursue their national interests. Nonetheless, their political and economic influence remains poorly understood.

It is now received wisdom that the U.S.-dominated global order has begun to give way to a new multipolar model. But this multipolar system is not simply one in which rising powers (such as China and India) and influential regional institutions (such as the European Union and ASEAN) counter-balance American influence. Substate actors now enjoy unprecedented influence on the world stage. In other words, the global playing field is not so much broadening as deepening, a trend that demands that states look beyond other states for the next generation of obstacles to the pursuit of their national interests.

First, consider the geopolitical influence of large companies, corporations and state-owned enterprises. Policymakers too often think of other countries' state-owned companies as mere extensions of their government's foreign policy. This is often not the case. When CNOOC, one of China's state-owned oil...