Top Central and Eastern European diplomats came to Capitol Hill on Tuesday to urge lawmakers to support nonmilitary and military means to counter Russian influence in the region. Representatives of Poland, Georgia, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and Ukraine accused Russia of waging hybrid warfare against them: cyberattacks, propaganda, threats of force and other means just shy of conventional warfare. 

Two years ago, the Obama administration announced a new strategy to curb online espionage.(...)The White House said it would increase public awareness of the threat, encourage the private sector to increase its defenses, focus diplomacy on protecting trade secrets overseas, improve trade secret theft legislation and make investigations and prosecutions of corporate and state-sponsored trade secret theft a top priority.

The unfolding episode over the film The Interview underlines the potential for business decisions, whatever their motivation, to become intertwined with foreign relations among states and companies.

So what if we envision a world of 2015 in which information technologies become agents of peace instead of sources of conflict? In many ways, we are already on that path, but the efforts are episodic.