Ironically, the cyber-attack that shut down the Web sites of the Department of the Treasury and the Federal Trade Commission struck on Independence Day. Because as unsophisticated as the attacks were, they made it clear that the U.S. is as intertwined with its enemies as it is with its allies, in a newly emerging, little-understood, and rapidly evolving 21st-century terrain.

In probing the future of American influence, it’s apparent now that cyberspace occupies a prominent place in an unwieldy battlefield known as the global commons. Michele Flournoy – who holds the position of undersecretary of defense for policy at the Pentagon, and is sometimes mentioned as a possible successor to Secretary of Defense Robert Gates – is now the big mind leading the Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), the strategic overhaul that takes place at the Pentagon every four years. And for her, more than anything, the global commons is where the U.S. will confront the new nature of conflict.

The QDR isn’t due until after the New Year, but Flournoy has just offered a glimpse of what it will look like in “The Contested Commons,” a piece co-authored with Shawn Brimley in Proceedings Magazine (published by the U.S. Naval Institute). It could be said that Flournoy’s thinking – and what will likely come of the new QDR – signals the advent of a new strategic landscape where the three chief threats that will face the U.S. in decades to come will be found: emerging powers vying for influence over the global commons, enemies waging hybrid warfare, and the instability of failed states.

As these threats reshape the battlefield, the implications are considerable. Flournoy and Brimley argue that “a foundational assumption on which every post-Cold War national security strategy has rested – uncontested access to and stability within the global commons – will begin to erode.”

Like so many of the other challenges facing the country, the advent of the new landscape presents the opportunity to either adapt and thrive or steer the same old course, straight toward decline. Parsing Flournoy and Brimley’s assessment immediately demonstrates the radical changes the QDR would have to bring about.

As new as it feels, the global commons is actually an old concept. While so much of warfare in human history has been waged to exert sovereign control – or outright domination – over a particular piece of land and the population inhabiting it, all along there have been common areas. At least for the last century or so, these common areas – which include the oceans, airspace, and outer space – have been shared by nation states.

Just how the global commons is shared has evolved over time. A perfect example is the law of the sea. Codified now in a U.N. convention, customs of maritime conduct in international law have been around for some 400 years. They include the notion that, for the benefit of all and in particular to stimulate trade, anything beyond a few miles off any state’s coastline is considered international waters, where everyone can freely pass.

The global commons today is under pressure from two new sources: the radical transformation of global society sparked by the Internet, and new rising powers on the international stage. As a result, it will be increasingly contentious, with new technologies playing a dominant role. Flournoy and Brimley state outright that, “Cyberwarfare is increasingly seen as an inevitable component of state and non-state conflicts.” They point to recent aggressive uses of such attacks by Russia and China as examples. Alarmingly, the U.S.’s defenses are now ill-prepared for such a reality.

Take the Fourth of July attacks. Analysts have explained that they were of the most rudimentary sort. Still, they managed to shut down Web sites of the U.S. government. And this comes on the heels of reports about more significant attacks by China against a wide range of sensitive targets around the globe.

The other two threats – hybrid warfare and failed states – feel more familiar. The former could easily include the kind of insurgency taking place in Iraq, and the latter the challenge of states like Afghanistan and Somalia. Startlingly, Flournoy and Brimley are unequivocal in their outlook: “As trends ranging from the economic crisis to climate change and globalization continue to put pressure on the modern state system, the number of chronically weak or outright failing states will likely increase.”

The challenge, then, is how the U.S. contributes to managing the international system. The goal isn’t domination, but instead, maintaining international law. Influence will actually come from order.

The advent of a new strategic landscape, as analyzed by a traditional, realist mind, would suggest that the first step should be to ramp up the country’s defenses and invest in power and technology to dominate sea, air, and cyberspace. With enough resources, that could be attempted. But the era of throwing more money and more firepower at strategic threats may already have ended.

Flournoy and Brimley take a wiser tack: embracing international law and order, which sounds much less like power-based realism and much more like ideal-based liberalism. The history of American foreign policy has long been a tug-of-war between the two. Perhaps the upcoming QDR will cut against the grain to re-embrace the legacy of President Woodrow Wilson, in an age he may not have recognized, but one that he would have well understood: that of an international order facing increasing turbulence, desperately in need of a strong system of governance.