Politics & Power Quote by Herman Kahn

Kahn’s sentence reads like a calm memo, but it’s really a warning flare from the early Cold War: the old playbook for governing is being shredded by speed. “New technologies” isn’t a neutral nod to progress; coming from a systems-minded futurist who thought in scenarios, it’s shorthand for nuclear weapons, computing, satellites, and the compression of decision time. When technology changes the stakes, “national decision” stops being an occasional act of politics and becomes a continuous, high-risk management problem.

The rhetorical trick is the piling up of “new”: new wealth, new conditions at home, new international relations. That repetition mimics acceleration and overload. Kahn is staging the feeling of modernity as a flood of variables, making the case that leaders can’t rely on inherited values or improvised instinct. Hence “unprecedented criteria and issues” - a quiet push for novel frameworks: cost-benefit thinking, game theory, deterrence logic, and the technocratic apparatus that can translate complexity into actionable choices.

Subtext: democracy is being asked to adjudicate problems it isn’t culturally prepared for, with consequences it can’t safely trial-and-error. “Domestic life” sits next to “international relations” to suggest that the frontier is gone; the household is geopolitical now, tied to energy, information, and the possibility of catastrophe. Kahn’s intent isn’t just description. It’s permission: to treat politics like a design challenge, to build new institutions, and to normalize strategic imagination before reality forces it.