The strategic environment has shifted. Alan Greenspan, the man who orchestrated American monetary policy for nearly two decades, is dead at 100. For those of us who track threat vectors and systemic vulnerabilities, his passing is not merely a historical footnote. It is a reminder that the intellectual architecture underpinning Western economic dominance is ageing, brittle, and now missing a key pillar.
Greenspan was not a soldier or a spymaster. He was something more dangerous: a theorist who turned ideology into policy. From 1987 to 2006, he chaired the Federal Reserve with an almost religious faith in deregulation and market self-correction. To his supporters, he was the maestro who tamed inflation and presided over the longest peacetime expansion in history. To his detractors, and I count myself among them, he was the man who laid the fuse for the 2008 financial crisis. His belief that banks could police themselves was a catastrophic intelligence failure. He misread the adversary. The adversary was the system itself.
Consider his strategic pivots. After the 1987 stock market crash, he flooded the system with liquidity, creating a moral hazard that would echo for decades. During the dot-com bubble, he refused to intervene, arguing that you cannot spot a bubble until after it bursts. Classic strategic denial. He treated the economy as a perfect machine, ignoring the asymmetric threats of fraud, leverage, and systemic contagion. When the housing market collapsed in 2008, the damage was global. The threat vector had been active for years. Greenspan had the sensors but ignored the data.
His legacy is now a vulnerability. The post-2008 regulatory response Dodd-Frank, stress tests, Basel III has created a more resilient banking sector. But the deeper problem remains: the global financial system is a target-rich environment for state and non-state actors. China, for instance, spent decades studying Greenspan's playbook. They know how we think. They know our weaknesses. The dollar's reserve status, the London interbank market, the repo market all are potential pressure points. A peer competitor with mature cyber warfare capabilities could exploit these chokepoints in a crisis.
Readiness is another concern. Greenspan's era was one of relative strategic stability, at least economically. The Cold War had ended, globalisation was accelerating, and the US enjoyed unipolar dominance. That world is gone. We now operate in a contested environment where economic weapons are as potent as kinetic ones. Yet our financial defence structures are still based on Greenspan's assumptions: transparency, trust, and rational actors. The adversary does not share these assumptions. They operate in grey zones, using sanctions evasion, currency manipulation, and cyber attacks. Our financial critical infrastructure is not hardened against a determined state actor.
What does Greenspan's death mean operationally? Little, in the immediate sense. The Fed has been functioning without his direct influence for years. But symbolically, it closes a chapter. The old orthodoxy that markets will self-regulate is dead. The new reality is that economic stability requires constant intelligence, active defence, and the willingness to use state power preemptively. We need to think like a grandmaster, not a trader.
In conclusion, Greenspan was a master of his era, but that era is over. The threat landscape has changed. We must pivot from reactive crisis management to strategic deterrence. The architect is gone. The building is still standing, but the blueprints are obsolete. We need new architects, and they must be warfighters, not economists.
