Back in 2002, serious people were worried about the possibility of a nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan. Millions might have died — and the prospect seemed real enough that both the US and the UK advised their citizens to flee the region. How, then, was the crisis defused?
Thomas Friedman, author of The World Is Flat, is fond of telling the story that US businesses (in particular Dell) told their Indian suppliers (in particular Wipro) to calm things down or get cut out of the loop. And things did indeed calm down, so perhaps it was the concerns over Dell’s supply chain that prevented catastrophe. Perhaps.
Mr Friedman duly coined the phrase “the Dell Theory Of Conflict Prevention”: no two countries will go to war if they are part of the same global supply chain. He was never entirely serious about that, but the question now arises: did he have it backwards? Rather than a line of defence against hostile action, might supply chains be a line of attack?