As we put autonomous cars on the road, connect Alexas to our lights and our thermostats, put ill-protected Internet-connected video cameras on our houses, and conduct our financial lives over our cell phones, our vulnerabilities expand exponentially.
David E. Sanger
There is no single 'China model' to running a mega-economy. Instead, it is a blend. From the Europeans and the Japanese, the Chinese have borrowed the concept of protecting essential industries.
Although Mr. Trump will not be able to pull the United States out of the Paris climate accord, he can legally ignore its provisions, in keeping with his questioning of the existence of man-made climate change.
Cyberattacks have long been hard to stop because determining where they come from takes time - and sometimes the mystery is never solved.
We have spent so much time worrying about a 'cyber Pearl Harbor,'' the attack that takes out the power grid, that we have focused far too little on the subtle manipulation of data that can mean that no election, medical record, or self-driving car can be truly trusted.
In an age of reckonings, when so many bills have come due, Obama has made the case for an America that can no longer do it all. It must pick its fights.
Because our government has been so incompetent at protecting its highly sophisticated cyberweapons, those weapons have been stolen out of the electronic vaults of the National Security Agency and the C.I.A. and shot right back at us.
In the old nuclear age, you could sit under a big screen under a mountain in Colorado, and you could see where the missiles were coming from.
If you go in to vote, and you are no longer confident that the vote that you put in is the way it's going to get recorded because you don't know if the Russians or someone else have gotten into the voting system, that undercuts your trust in the democratic process.
The government does not deny it routinely spies to advance American economic advantage, which is part of its broad definition of how it protects American national security.
Mr. Obama is the first president to have grown up in the region - he lived in Indonesia as an elementary school student - and he has never doubted that America is underinvested in Asia and overinvested in the Middle East.
Unfettered markets eventually get out of whack.
We had a great chance in the mid-2000s to reach an accord with the Chinese on both energy and environmental issues. That deal would have essentially been that the U.S. could provide the equipment and expertise, and the Chinese would help close the trade gap. It was a huge opportunity that we failed to exploit.
When Russia's intelligence agencies obtained some of the National Security Agency's secrets about its own cyberweapons, it appeared to do so by manipulating a virus protection program sold by Kaspersky, a Russian firm.
When confronted with a direct threat to American security, Obama has shown he is willing to act unilaterally - in a targeted, get-in-and-get-out fashion, that avoids, at all costs, the kind of messy ground wars and lengthy occupations that have drained America's treasury and spirit for the past decades.
State oil companies in Saudi Arabia, Africa, Iran, and Mexico have often been intelligence targets for the United States.
It's no surprise that hackers working for North Korea, Iran's mullahs, Vladimir V. Putin in Russia, and the People's Liberation Army of China have all learned that the great advantage of cyberweapons is that they are the opposite of a nuke: hard to detect, easy to deny, and increasingly finely targeted.
Mr. Trump has been consistent in some areas. Since the late 1980s, he has nurtured a set of preoccupations, chiefly that America's allies - Japan and Saudi Arabia among them - are ripping America off.
When Japan was on the rise, American governors would come to inspect Toyota City and study 'just in time' manufacturing to increase efficiency; when America was at its peak in the late 1990s, the world beat a path to its venture capitalists.
American officials sometimes dig into corporations because they are suspected to be witting or unwitting suppliers of technology to the North Koreans or the Iranians.
The Trump vision, in fact, is an America unbound by a half-century of trade deals, free to pursue a nationalistic approach in which success is measured not by the quality of its alliances but the economic return on its transactions.
A Trump presidency will plunge the United States into an era of unknowns that has little parallel in the nation's 240-year history.
There's this incredibly young, dynamic, educated population in Iran that is essentially pretty pro-American.
If there's a cyberattack from China or Russia or Romania or Mexico, it may well run through a server in another country. And it may take months before you know where it really came from.
There are a lot of columnists who get out and opine.
Bloggers are not reporters.
Never mention a web site is coming until it's already there.
The United States lost a bit of the moral high ground when it comes to warning the world of the danger of cyberattacks.
In the Chinese view, the United States has designed its own system of rules about what constitutes 'legal' spying and what is illegal.
Once cyber crosses into the realm of the physical, then it's a physical attack, but it starts with cyber. And the idea of a cyber attack being able to take control of machines - that becomes a scary process.
Until Japan's economy drove off a cliff, there was a running argument in Asia about whether it would be wiser to follow the 'Japan model' - with its megacorporations, jobs for life, state control of strategic industries - or the 'American model' of largely unfettered markets.
I did think that it'd be truly cool to be a foreign correspondent, and it was. There is a degree of freedom - and the right to roam the earth on somebody else's nickel.
Under the Trump administration, the traditional structure of White House oversight of American offensive and defensive cyberactivities is being dismantled.
The United States Cyber Command was created partly in response to a Russian hacking attack that long predated the 2016 election.
The remarkable thing about the Chinese is that they've operated differently than the Russians, the Iranians, and the North Koreans. By and large, they have not done destructive hacks.
I've been covering North Korea nuclear issues since I was a young reporter in the Tokyo bureau of 'The Times' and wrote some of the first pieces about the existence of the program at Yongbyon.
What the Russians did in the election in 2016 was clearly short of war, yet it was a pretty aggressive act to go into another country's voting system.
There are certainly some secrets the government needs to protect, but many of the most important clues about revolutions, nuclear transfers, and new military sites can be found online, in open chat rooms and commercial satellite photos.
Back channels themselves are as old as American diplomacy. Thomas Jefferson was an early enthusiast - he often routed around his secretary of state, once sending a secret letter to the American envoy in France, Robert Livingston, that contained a coded message.
After more than two decades of traveling with American presidents and chief diplomats - on visits to places that have included some of the world's most repressive nations - I am used to watching leaders disappear behind closed doors.
Even China's leaders routinely let the news media pool in, though they do their best to ignore them.
