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Although the methods of terrorist organizations are considered barbaric -- and therefore not to be emulated -- by practitioners of the Judeo-Christian value system favored by Western civilization, Joshua Cooper Ramo argues that there are important lessons the West should learn from groups like Hezbollah.

"I think really resilient systems kind of look like our immune system in a way, that they're capable of confronting things that they've never seen before and they actually get stronger as a result," Ramo told The Jewish State in a phone interview. "Hezbollah is an example of how that can be very dangerous and very evil in some settings, but having that ability to kind of absorb shocks and bounce back is very important."

Ramo is the author of the just published "The Age of the Unthinkable: Why the New World Disorder Constantly Surprises Us and What We Can Do About it". In it, Ramo discusses the need for systems to be resilient.

Ramo, managing director at the geostrategic advisory firm Kissinger Associates and former foreign editor of Time magazine, said he wrote the book because he believed the way we were engaging the world using traditional models "was not only failing, but was backfiring. And that the result of sometimes our best policies -- kind of what the experts were telling us to do -- was very different than what we had intended. And it made me very nervous, frankly."

The Hezbollah riddle

Terrorist groups like Hezbollah, Ramo said, have the advantage of being stateless, which gives them freedom of movement and makes them moving targets. Not every terrorist group is able to exploit this, Ramo said, since many of them can't take the pressure of constantly changing surroundings. But the ones that can adapt are the groups that are not only resilient enough, but become more resilient as the battles drag on.

"The more you attack them, the more clever they get," Ramo said.

In Israel's battle with Hezbollah in Lebanon and northern Israel, Ramo said that Israel can level the playing field, but not through conventional attacks.

The chess match involves creative offense as well as resourceful defense, he said.

"One thing to do is to not choose policies that maybe seem like the most obvious, which is to attack them directly, but in the long run actually make them more powerful," Ramo said. "The second thing is to try to focus as much as possible on the things that do make them resilient."

That is the necessity that inspired Israel's use of targeted assassinations, a tactic that Israel pioneered and has had a great degree of success with, he said.

"If you're trying to fight terrorist organizations, the trick is not to arrest thousands of people and tear down lots of homes, the trick is just really to aim at the five or 10 or 20 people who are the core of the organization," according to Ramo.

Ramo noted that Hezbollah needs Israel to attack it in order to learn its own weaknesses and to feed off of the collateral damage by rebuilding homes or providing food to Lebanese victims of Israeli strikes.

He said there is no way to attack Hezbollah directly without making them more resilient. A new strategy is necessary, he said -- and that serves as a metaphor for the Western world's ability to confront 21st century global threats.

"I think you try to choke off the supplies, you try to attack them indirectly," Ramo said. "Just like the most effective cancer medication doesn't go after the tumor, it goes after the blood supply leading to the tumor."

The problem, he said, is that modern nations tend to be countries "that don't like change in a world that's changing very fast. It's a terrible situation to be in."

What are we looking at?

Ramo recommends re-learning our instincts. In his book, he offers some examples of eschewing head-on attacks in favor of actions that have more strategic effects. One such example is that of James Moffat, a British mathematician in the U.K.'s Ministry of Defense, who was charged with designing a counterattack in August 1982 after Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands. Moffat came up with a plan to bomb out the islands' lone airfield. It not only succeeded in rendering the runways unusable, but sent a message to the Argentine leaders that the British could strike them, too.

Argentina got the message and scrambled into a defensive posture. One fairly indirect bomb that caused no casualties and no damage to the invading forces changed the whole battle.

Ramo also discusses the work of experimental psychologist Richard Nisbett, and a test he conducted at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 2004. Nisbett and his team took 25 students who were raised in America, and 25 students who were raised in China. They were put in a headrest and told to look at images flashed on a screen. The images had an object in the foreground, such as a horse or a tiger, and a forest, field, or other "realistic complex background" behind it.

A device that tracked the students' eye movement, as well as the subsequent questioning of the participants, showed a clear pattern: the American students concentrated on the object in the foreground, while the Chinese students focused on the environment surrounding the object.

The importance of understanding the environment, Ramo said, is something Westerners must grasp.

"We've got to understand that the variables that determine success are not always what they appear to be."

How to avoid incentivizing risk

Ramo's book comes at a time when political leaders are struggling to find solutions to the current banking and credit crises. Ramo said the global financial system is based on large institutions, such as banks, yet the source of instability is often the smaller players who are more difficult to manage and regulate.

What makes the system vulnerable, he said, is the fact that those small players can set off a domino effect because the parts of the system are all connected. Our current crisis, he said, started in the mortgage markets, and was followed by the credit crisis, and "we can never quite seem to stop it because we live in a world where everything is interconnected."

That international cooperation is not necessarily a bad thing, he said. Resilient systems distribute power as widely as possible, he said, and the challenge is not whether to connect the various parts, but rather how to connect them.

"A crisis like this is a unique moment to try to bring people together to focus on those things, but it's also a very perilous moment because people may decide to go their own way," he said.

Ramo said the bailouts of major financial institutions may help in the short run, but in the long run they stop the system from doing what Hezbollah does to remain strong -- absorb impact, assess the damage, and ascertain the true costs of its actions.

"When you bail these people out, you just create incentive for taking bigger and bigger risks," he said. "So the challenge the government faces now is that it needs to find a way both to let the real costs of those risks be learned by the system and at the same time not cause the system to collapse. So you need kind of a more differentiated approach probably than the one that we're worried that we have today, one that says let's do whatever we can to protect the real economy, but the financial economy has got to absorb and deal with costs of the mistakes that they've made."

Ramo stressed that the West cannot treat security challenges and financial crises as separate events. Instead of chasing the source of each problem after the fact, he said, political leaders must maintain a system that is proactive in treating underlying infections, not symptoms. For example, the spread of extremist political ideologies, nuclear weapons, cyberweapons, bioweapons, and other threats are part of a long list of things that menace the whole system.

"And any one of those is potentially a devastating threat to the system, again because everything is so interconnected," Ramo said. "So I think we are missing those things. I think we do tend to treat 9/11 and the financial crisis as separate issues; I think they're both expressions of the same underlying problem, which is that we live in an age where power is ever more granular and the old ways of managing it just don't work."

"The Age of the Unthinkable" is available from Borders, Barnes and Noble, Amazon.com, and other major booksellers.