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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There's this incredibly young, dynamic, educated population in Iran that is essentially pretty pro-American.
Under the Trump administration, the traditional structure of White House oversight of American offensive and defensive cyberactivities is being dismantled.
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.