Géopolitique Mondiale

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The Geopolitics of World War III

The real reason Russia and Syria are being targeted right now.

Contrary to popular belief, the conduct of nations on the international stage is almost never driven by moral considerations, but rather by a shadowy cocktail of money and geopolitics. As such, when you see the mouthpieces of the ruling class begin to demonize a foreign country, the first question in your mind should always be "what is actually at stake here?"

For some time now Russia, China, Iran, and Syria have been in the cross hairs. Once you understand why, the events unfolding in the world right now will make much more sense.

The U.S. dollar is a unique currency. In fact its current design and its relationship to geopolitics is unlike any other in history. Though it has been the world reserve currency since 1944, this is not what makes it unique. Many currencies have held the reserve status off and on over the centuries, but what makes the dollar unique is the fact that since the early 1970s it has been, with a few notable exceptions, the only currency used to buy and sell oil on the global market.

Prior to 1971 the U.S. dollar was bound to the gold standard, at least officially. According to the IMF, by 1966, foreign central banks held $14 billion U.S. dollars, however the United States had only $3.2 billion in gold allocated to cover foreign holdings.

Translation: the Federal Reserve was printing more money than it could actually back.

The result was rampant inflation and a general flight from the dollar.

In 1971 in what later came to be called the "Nixon Shock" President Nixon removed the dollar from the gold standard completely.

At this point the dollar became a pure debt based currency. With debt based currencies money is literally loaned into existence.

Approximately 70% of the money in circulation is created by ordinary banks which are allowed to loan out more than they actually have in their accounts.
The rest is created by the Federal Reserve which loans money that they don't have, mostly to government.

Kind of like writing hot checks, except it's legal, for banks. This practice which is referred to as fractional reserve banking is supposedly regulated by the Federal Reserve, an institution which just happens to be owned and controlled by a conglomerate of banks, and no agency or branch of government regulates the Federal Reserve.



Now to make things even more interesting these fractional reserve loans have interest attached, but the money to pay that interest doesn't exist in the system. As a result there is always more total debt than there is money in circulation, and in order to stay afloat the economy must grow perpetually.

This is obviously not sustainable.

Now you might be wondering how the dollar has maintained such a dominant position on the world stage for over forty years if it's really little more than an elaborate ponzi scheme.

Well this is where the dollar meets geopolitics.

In 1973 under the shadow of the artificial OPEC oil crisis, the Nixon administration began secret negotiations with the government of Saudi Arabia to establish what came to be referred to as the petrodollar recycling system. Under the arrangement the Saudis would only sell their oil in U.S. dollars, and would invest the majority of their excess oil profits into U.S. banks and Capital markets. The IMF would then use this money to facilitate loans to oil importers who were having difficulties covering the increase in oil prices. The payments and interest on these loans would of course be denominated in U.S. dollars.

This agreement was formalized in the "The U.S.-Saudi Arabian Joint Commission on Economic Cooperation" put together by Nixon's Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in 1974.

Another document released by the Congressional Research Service reveals that these negotiations had an edge to them, as U.S. officials were openly discussing the feasibility of seizing oil fields in Saudi Arabia militarily.

In the United States, the oil shocks produced inflation, new concern about foreign investment from oil producing countries, and open speculation about the advisability and feasibility of militarily seizing oil fields in Saudi Arabia or other countries. In the wake of the embargo, both Saudi and U.S. officials worked to re-anchor the bilateral relationship on the basis of shared opposition to Communism, renewed military cooperation, and through economic initiatives that promoted the recycling of Saudi petrodollars to the United States via Saudi investment in infrastructure, industrial expansion, and U.S. securities.

The system was expanded to include the rest of OPEC by 1975.

Though presented as buffer to the recessionary effects of rising oil prices, this arrangement had a hidden side effect. It removed the traditional restraints on U.S. monetary policy.

The Federal Reserve was now free to increase the money supply at will. The ever increasing demand for oil would would prevent a flight from the dollar, while distributing the inflationary consequences across the entire planet.

The dollar went from being a gold back currency to a oil backed currency. It also became America's primary export.

Did you ever wonder how the U.S. economy has been able to stay afloat while running multibillion dollar trade deficits for decades?

Did you ever wonder how it is that the U.S. holds such a disproportionate amount of the worlds wealth when 70% of the U.S. economy is consumer based?

In the modern era, fossil fuels make the world go round. They have become integrated into every aspect of civilization: agriculture, transportation, plastics, heating, defense and medicine, and demand just keeps growing and growing.

As long as the world needs oil, and as long as oil is only sold in U.S. dollars, there will be a demand for dollars, and that demand is what gives the dollar its value.

For the United States this is a great deal. Dollars go out, either as paper or digits in a computer system, and real tangible products and services come in. However for the rest of the world, it's a very sneaky form of exploitation.

Having global trade predominately in dollars also provides the Washington with a powerful financial weapon through sanctions. This is due to the fact that most large scale dollar transactions are forced to pass through the U.S.

This petrodollar system stood unchallenged until September of 2000 when Saddam Hussein announced his decision to switch Iraq's oil sales off of the dollar to Euros. This was a direct attack on the dollar, and easily the most important geopolitical event of the year, but only one article in the western media even mentioned it.

In the same month that Saddam announced he was moving away from the dollar, an organization called the “The Project for a New American Century”, of which Dick Cheney just happened to be a member, released a document entitled “REBUILDING AMERICA’S DEFENSES Strategy, Forces and Resources For a New Century”. This document called for massive increases in U.S. military spending and a much more aggressive foreign policy in order to expand U.S. dominance world wide. However the document lamented that achieving these goals would take many years “absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor”.



One year later they got it.

Riding the emotional reaction to 9/11, the Bush administration was able to invade Afghanistan and Iraq and pass the patriot act all without any significant resistance.

There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and this wasn't a question of bad intelligence. This was a cold calculated lie, and the decision to invade was made in full knowledge of the disaster which would follow.



They knew exactly what was going to happen but in 2003, they did it anyway. Once Iraqi oil fields were under U.S. control, oil sales were immediately switched back to the dollar. Mission accomplished.

Soon after the invasion of Iraq the Bush administration attempted to extend these wars to Iran. Supposedly the Iranian government was working to build a nuclear weapon. After the Iraq fiasco Washington's credibility was severely damaged as a result they were unable to muster international or domestic support for an intervention. Their efforts were further sabotaged by elements within the CIA and Mossad who came forward to state that Iran had not even made the decision to develop nuclear weapons much less begin an attempt. However the demonization campaign against Iran continued even into the Obama administration.

Why?

Well, might it have something to do with the fact that since 2004 Iran has been in the process of organizing an independent oil bourse? They were building their own oil market, and it wasn't going to be tied to the dollar. The first shipments of oil were sold through this market in July of 2011.

Unable to get the war that they wanted, the U.S. used the U.N to impose sanctions against Iran. The goal of the sanctions was to topple the Iranian regime. While this did inflict damage on the Iranian economy, the measures failed to destabilize the country. This was due in large part to Russia's assistance in bypassing U.S. banking restrictions.

In February of 2009 Muammar Gaddafi, was named chairman of the African Union. He immediately proposed the formation of a unified state with a single currency. It was the nature of that proposed currency that got him killed.

In March of 2009 the African Union released a document entitled "Towards a Single African Currency". Pages 106 and 107 of that document specifically discuss the benefits and technicalities of running the African Central bank under a gold standard. On page 94 it explicitly states that the key to the success of the African Monetary Union would be the "eventual linking of a single African currency to the most monetary of all commodities - gold." (Note that the page number is different on other versions of the document that they released.)

In 2011 the CIA moved into Libya and began backing militant groups in their campaign to topple Gaddafi and the U.S. and NATO pushed through and stretched a U.N. nofly-zone resolution to tip the balance with airstrikes. The presence of Al-Qaeda extremists among these rebel fighters was swept under the rug.

Libya, like Iran and Iraq had committed the unforgivable crime of challenging the U.S. dollar.

The NATO intervention in Libya segued into a covert war on Syrian. The armories of the Libyan government were looted and the weapons were shipped via Turkey to Syrian rebels groups working to topple Assad. It was already clear at this point that many of these fighters had ties to terrorist organizations. However the U.S. national security apparatus viewed this as a necessary evil. In fact the Council on Foreign relations published an article in 2012 stating that "The influx of jihadis brings discipline, religious fervor, battle experience from Iraq, funding from Sunni sympathizers in the Gulf, and most importantly, deadly results. In short, the FSA needs al-Qaeda now."

(Hat tip to theantimedia.org for catching this.)

Let's be clear here, the U.S. put ISIS in power.



In 2013 these same Al-Qaeda linked Syrian rebels launched two sarin gas attacks. This was an attempt to frame Assad and muster international support for military intervention. Fortunately they were exposed by U.N. and Russian investigators and the push for airstrikes completely fell apart when Russia stepped in to broker a diplomatic solution.



The campaign for regime change in Syria, as in Libya has been presented in terms of human rights. Obviously this isn't the real motive.

In 2009, Qatar put forth a proposal to run a natural gas pipeline through Syria and Turkey to Europe. Assad however rejected this, and in 2011 he forged a pact with Iraq and Iran to run a pipeline eastward cutting Qatar and Saudi Arabia out of the loop completely. Not surprisingly Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Turkey have been the most aggressive regional players in the push to topple the Syrian government.

But why would this pipeline dispute put Syria in Washington's cross hairs? Three reasons:

1. This pipeline arrangement would significantly strengthen Iran's position, allowing them to export to European markets without having to pass through any of Washington's allies. This obviously reduces the U.S. government's leverage.
2. Syria is Iran's closest ally. It's collapse would inherently weaken Iran.
3. Syria and Iran have a mutual defense agreement, and a U.S. intervention in Syria could open the door to open conflict with Iran.

In February of 2014 this global chess game heated up in a new venue: Ukraine. The real target however was Russia.

You see Russia just happens to be the worlds second largest oil exporter, and not only have they been a thorn in Washington's side diplomatically, but they also opened an energy bourse in 2008, with sales denominated in Rubles and gold. This project had been in the works since 2006. They have also been working with China to pull off of the dollar in all of their bilateral trade.

Russia has also been in the process of organizing a Eurasian Economic Union which includes plans to adopt common currency unit, and which is slated to have its own independent energy market.

Leading up to the crisis in Ukraine had been presented with a choice: either join the E.U. under an association agreement or join the Eurasian Union. The E.U. insisted that this was an either or proposition. Ukraine couldn't join both. Russia on the other hand, asserted that joining both posed no issue. President Yanukovich decided to go with Russia.

In response the U.S. national security apparatus did what it does best: they toppled Yanukovich and installed a puppet government. To see the full evidence of Washington's involvement in the coup watch "The ukraine crisis what you're not being told"



This article from the Guardian is also worth reading.

Though this all seemed to be going well at first, the U.S. quickly lost control of the situation. Crimea held a referendum and the people voted overwhelmingly to secede from Ukraine and reunify with Russia. The transition was orderly and peaceful. No one was killed, yet the West immediately framed the entire event as an act of Russian aggression, and this became the go to mantra from that point on.

Crimea is important geostrategically because of its position in the Black Sea which allows for the projection of naval power into the Mediterranean. It has also been Russian territory for most of recent history.

The U.S. has been pushing for Ukraine's inclusion into NATO for years now. Such a move would place U.S. forces right on Russia's border and could have potentially resulted in Russia losing their naval base in Crimea. This is why Russia immediately accepted the results of the Crimean referendum and quickly consolidated the territory.

Meanwhile in Eastern Ukraine, two regions declared independence from Kiev and held referendums of their own. The results of which overwhelmingly favored self rule.

Kiev responded to this with what they referred to as anti-terrorist operations. In practice this was a massive and indiscriminate shelling campaign which killed thousands of civilians. Apparently killing civilians didn't qualify as aggression to the West. In fact the IMF explicitly warned the provisional government that their 17 billion dollar loan package could be in danger if they were not able to put down the uprising in eastern Ukraine.

While the war against eastern Ukraine was raging elections were held and Petro Poroshenko was elected president. It turns out that Poroshenko, was exposed by a leaked diplomatic cable released by wikileaks in 2008 as having worked as a mole for the U.S. State Department since 2006. They referred to him as "Our Ukraine insider" and much of the cable referred to information that he was providing. (A separate cable showed that the U.S. knew Poroshenko was corrupt even at that point.)

Having a puppet in place however hasn't turned out to be enough to give Washington the upper hand in this crisis. What does Washington do when they have no other leverage? They impose sanctions, they demonize and they saber rattle (or pull a false flag).

This isn't a very good strategy when dealing with Russia. In fact it has already backfired. The sanctions have merely pushed Russia and China into closer cooperation and accelerated Russia's de-dollarization agenda. And in spite of the rhetoric, this has not led to Russia being isolated. The U.S. and NATO have put a wedge between themselves and Russia, but not between Russia and the rest of the world (look up BRICS if you are unclear about this).

This new anti-dollar axis goes deeper than economics. These countries understand what's at stake here. This is why in the wake of the Ukrainian crisis China has proposed a new Eurasian security pact which would include Russia and Iran.

Consider the implications here as the Obama administration begins bombing in Syria which also has a mutual defense agreement with Iran.

This is not the cold war 2.0. This is World War 3.0. The masses may not have figured it out yet, but history will remember it that way.

Alliances are already solidifying and and a hot war is underway on multiple fronts. If the provocations and proxy wars continue, it's only a matter of time before the big players confront each other directly, and that is a recipe for disaster.

Does all of this sound insane to you? Well you're right. The people running the world right now are insane, and the public is sleep walking into a tragedy. If you want to alter the course that we are on, there's only one way to do it. We have to wake up that public. Even the most powerful weapons of war are neutralized if you reach the mind of the man behind the trigger.

How do we wake the masses you ask? Don't wait for someone else to answer that for you. Get creative. Act like you children's and grandchildren's futures depend on it, because they do.

Guy Burton - The Diplomat - a écrit:

China and India’s Stakes in the Qatar Conflict

The resolution of the rift between Qatar on one side and Saudi Arabia and the UAE on the other will cause sighs of relief in Beijing and New Delhi.

Both India and China welcomed the outcome of last week’s Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) summit, where Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Bahrain promised to end their diplomatic and economic blockade of Qatar and Qatar agreed to drop pending lawsuits against them.

The reopening of borders in the Gulf may result in a resurgence in intra-regional trade, investment, and connectivity. Indian and Chinese business may similarly benefit from that development and prompt political leaders to congratulate themselves for not having taken sides in public when the conflict first erupted back in June 2017.

China’s government may also see the dispute’s resolution as vindication for its approach toward conflict management, in particular that of “peace through development.” For the Chinese this entails political mediation that is linked to economic development and connectivity through infrastructure projects associated with its Belt and Road Initiative.

However, Indian and Chinese leaders would be advised to contain the self-congratulation. Not only has Chinese involvement been largely absent in the deliberations that led to the settlement at Al-Ula, but both sides adopted positions that in practice accommodated Saudi Arabia and the UAE during the past three and a half years.

If there is an achievement, it lies in India’s and China’s ability to ride the waves generated by the crisis. Initially, the dispute looked as if it could not have come at a worse time for both the Indian and Chinese governments. For one, the region was – and remains – a key source of oil and gas for the two countries. For another, the nature of economic exchange and interaction between them and the Gulf had been progressively growing.

During the year before the rupture, the Chinese government had set out a more active strategy in the region. In 2016 it published an Arab policy paper. It had also restarted negotiations on a free trade agreement with the GCC, which Beijing believed it was close to achieving only a month before the dispute began.

Like China, India was also pursuing a more active regional role. After becoming prime minister in 2014, Narendra Modi had begun to recalibrate India’s foreign policy and pursue greater political and economic ties with the Gulf. The dispute not only presented a challenge to that effort, but also raised fears in the government for the 6.5 million strong Indian diaspora in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar.

Although both the Indian and Chinese governments expressed concern, those fears outweighed the reality. The Gulf states did not press India or China to pick a side and nor did the Asian powers offer to do so – which demonstrated their importance to each other.

This practical consideration was evident even as the circumstances changed within the region. As established trade routes and ties were closed to Qatar, it searched out alternative partners, including Turkey and Iran, while also investing in domestic production. Meanwhile, Indian and Chinese firms continued to operate on both sides and remittances from Indian workers continued to flow back home.

Yet even as Indian and Chinese political and business leaders adjusted to the changes taking place within the Gulf, there was another implicit shift between the region and the Asian powers: one in which the China and India prioritized Saudi Arabia and the UAE over Qatar.

The reasons for doing so made practical sense. Politically and economically, Saudi Arabia and the UAE were – and are – far more important in the region than Qatar. Economically, the two Gulf states figure among both India’s and China’s largest trading partners. At the same time, the changes imposed on Qatar meant that it could not afford to lose partners like India and China.

Despite this, Qatar fared relatively less well than its rivals. While China’s total trade with Qatar doubled between 2016 and 2019, its investments in the country were more modest in 2017-19. They totaled $900 million compared to $12.55 billion in Saudi Arabia and $20.35 billion in the UAE. Meanwhile, India’s total trade with Qatar fell by 39 percent during the 2014-19, which was more than the 27 percent fall in total trade with Saudi Arabia. Trade with the UAE, meanwhile, increased 12 percent in the same period.

The disparity between the Saudis and the UAE on one side and Qatar on the other was also evident in the nature of the Gulf states’ political cooperation with India and China as well. By 2018 China had established comprehensive strategic partnerships with Saudi Arabia and the UAE – the highest form of engagement it can offer another country. In contrast, China’s relationship with Qatar was only a strategic partnership, which it had agreed in 2014 and showed no interest in upgrading when Sheikh Tamim Al Thani visited Beijing in 2019.

India has similarly expansive arrangements with Saudi Arabia and the UAE. It established a Strategic Partnership Council with Riyadh and has also sought to cultivate closer security ties with the two. In recent years that has been expressed in its efforts to bring Riyadh and Abu Dhabi onboard in India’s rivalry with Pakistan. That has included gaining their acquiescence in 2019 to the constitutional changes made regarding the status of the disputed Jammu and Kashmir region and in last month’s visit by the Indian army chief to both countries.

Looking ahead, the imbalance between the Gulf states in the eyes of Indian and Chinese policymakers will remain. But whereas the conflict exposed them, its resolution should obscure them again. That should therefore enable the growing connectivity between the Gulf states and the Asian powers to continue on its present trajectory. Yet even as this happens, they will likely continue to keep a wary eye on the Gulf, especially the differences between the Saudis and the UAE over how fast to reconcile, with the latter being less enthusiastic.

Admiral Charles A. Richard - U.S. Naval Institute a écrit:

Forging 21st-Century Strategic Deterrence

The sea-based strategic deterrent inherent in the U.S. Navy’s ballistic missile submarines will remain a vital part of our national defense. Here, the USS Henry M. Jackson (SSBN-730) is at sea in late 2020 off the Hawaiian Islands.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Department of Defense (DoD) has not had to consider the possibility of great power competition, crisis, or direct armed conflict with a nuclear-capable peer. Unfortunately, the current environment no longer affords us that luxury. The implications of today’s competition and the associated risk of great power crisis or direct armed conflict are profound; they affect nearly every fundamental assumption we make about the use of armed force in the defense of the nation and its allies. Until we, as a department, come to understand, if not accept, what we are facing and what should be done about it, we run the risk of developing plans we cannot execute and procuring capabilities that will not deliver desired outcomes. In the absence of change, we are on the path, once again, to prepare for the conflict we prefer, instead of one we are likely to face. It is through this lens that we must take a hard look at how we intend to compete against and deter our adversaries, assure our allies, and appropriately shape the future joint force.

I bristle when I hear the DoD accused of “being stuck in the Cold War.” The department is well past the Cold War; in fact, a large part of our challenge lies in the fact that we no longer view our environment through the lens of potential enemy nuclear employment. The United States has sustained global counter-terrorism efforts for two decades—and has grown accustomed to ignoring the nuclear dimension. Our recent experiences against non-nuclear-armed adversaries have allowed us to believe nuclear use is impossible and not worthy of attention. At the U.S. Strategic Command, we assess the probability of nuclear use is low, but not “impossible,” particularly in a crisis and as our nuclear-armed adversaries continue to build capability and exert themselves globally. Further, assessing risk is more than just assessing likelihood; it also involves accounting for outcomes. We cannot dismiss or ignore events that currently appear unlikely but, should they occur, would have catastrophic consequences.

While DoD’s focus has been on counterterrorism, Russia and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) have begun to aggressively challenge international norms and global peace using instruments of power and threats of force in ways not seen since the height of the Cold War—and in some cases, in ways not seen during the Cold War, such as cyberattacks and threats in space. Not surprisingly, they are even taking advantage of the global pandemic to advance their national agendas. These behaviors are destabilizing, and if left unchecked, increase the risk of great power crisis or conflict. We must actively compete to hold their aggression in check; ceding to their initiatives risks reinforcing their perceptions that the United States is unwilling or unable to respond, which could further embolden them. Additionally, our allies may interpret inaction as an unwillingness or inability to lead. Remaining passive may deny us opportunities to position in ways that underpin one of our greatest strengths: strategic power projection. The moment an adversary’s initiative becomes a fait accompli, the United States would be forced to decide whether to accept their “new normal,” employ military force to reestablish the status quo, or set our own “new normal.”

The strategic capabilities of our competitors continue to grow, and they are sobering. More than a decade ago, Russia began aggressively modernizing its nuclear forces, including its non-treaty-accountable medium- and short-range systems. It is modernizing bombers, intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs), nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines, warning systems, command-and-control (C2) capabilities, and the doctrine to underpin their employment—in short, its entire strategic force structure. This modernization is about 70 percent complete and on track to be fully realized in a few years. In addition, Russia is building new and novel systems, such as hypersonic glide vehicles, nuclear-armed and nuclear-powered torpedoes and cruise missiles, and other capabilities. And its leaders have not been reticent to leverage these capabilities to coerce its neighbors. During the annexation of Crimea in 2014, President Vladimir Putin reminded the world of Russia’s nuclear weapon capabilities, both through words and deeds, to warn against any attempts at reversing the outcome.1

Increased nuclear capability and technologically advanced weapons development are not the only ways Russia challenges the world’s stability. Its military forces often engage in unsafe actions in close proximity to U.S. military forces—actions reflected in headlines such as “Russian Su-35 Fighter Makes ‘Irresponsible’ Intercept of Navy P-8A over Mediterranean,” and “Russian Destroyer Put U.S. Cruiser at Risk with ‘Unsafe’ Maneuver.”2 Russia also constantly challenges norms in cyberspace, as demonstrated by last year’s cyberattack on Georgia’s government and its recent penetrations into U.S. government systems.3 According to U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, “This action contradicts Russia’s attempts to claim it is a responsible actor in cyberspace.”4 Then, in early 2020, Russia conducted an antisatellite test, threatening international assets in space. Together, these actions demonstrate Russia’s willingness to compete aggressively and ignore international norms.


Russia and China are growing and modernizing their strategic nuclear forces. Here, a Russian RS-24 Yars (or Topol-MR) road-mobile intercontinental ballistic missile moves along a highway in Teikovo, Ivanovo region, Russia

The People’s Republic of China is also on a trajectory to be a strategic peer and should not be mistaken as a “lesser included” case. Like Russia, it acts aggressively to challenge democratic values and shape the global economic order to its benefit. China continues to make technological leaps in capabilities in every domain. Across its conventional weapons systems, it continues to invest significant resources in hypersonic and advanced missile systems, as well as to expand its space and counter-space capabilities. Its advances in space provide better C2 of its forces worldwide and enhance their situational awareness. It created islands in the South China Sea and placed multiple weapons systems on them. Like the Russians, People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Air Force and Navy forces harass U.S. and allied aircraft and forces operating in international airspace and waters. The PRC also continues to invest heavily in its nuclear capabilities. Its strategic dyad of ICBMs and SLBMs will soon become a triad, with the completion of a nuclear-capable long-range bomber. China is building new land-based, road-mobile ICBMs, providing its forces more flexibility and capability. The PLA Navy Jin-class ballistic-missile submarines carry up to 12 SLBMs each. China has built new warning and C2 capabilities and improved its readiness. Further, China’s nuclear weapons stockpile is expected to double (if not triple or quadruple) over the next decade.

Acting in a responsible manner is incumbent upon any great power. For China, we must pay attention to PRC’s actions more than its stated policies. While the PRC has maintained a “No First Use” policy since the 1960s—contending it will never use a nuclear weapon first—its buildup of advanced capabilities should give us pause. This policy could change in the blink of an eye. Beijing is pursuing capabilities and operating in a manner inconsistent with a minimum deterrent strategy, giving it a full range of options, including limited use and a first-strike capability.

Faced with Russia and China’s growing threats and gray zone actions, the United States must take action today to position itself for the future. We must start by acknowledging that our most fundamental assumption—that strategic deterrence will hold, even through crisis and conflict—is going to be tested in ways not seen before. This assumption is the foundation on which we built strategies, plans, and capabilities. Unfortunately, our opponents invested in nuclear and strategic capabilities designed to constrain U.S. actions, test our alliances, and, if necessary, escalate past us—to include nuclear use. There is a real possibility that a regional crisis with Russia or China could escalate quickly to a conflict involving nuclear weapons, if they perceived a conventional loss would threaten the regime or state. Consequently, the U.S. military must shift its principal assumption from “nuclear employment is not possible” to “nuclear employment is a very real possibility,” and act to meet and deter that reality. We cannot approach nuclear deterrence the same way.  It must be tailored and evolved for the dynamic environment we face.

Second, we must wrestle with the relationships among competition, deterrence, and assurance. Despite views to the contrary, successful competition does not result in an “end state.” Great power competition does not span four quarters or nine innings, and our competitors are no less committed than we are. Instead, we should view competition as the mainte-nance of relative advantage over competitors. It is an infinite game, one in which the goal is to remain a dominant player. History offers several examples of competitions that have ended, only to resurface in different, more challenging ways. For example, the collapse of the Soviet Union and end of the Cold War did not result in a singular world order, as many expected.

The idea that competition is about relative advantage also calls into question the oft-espoused view that effective competition reinforces deterrence. Arguably, if a competitive gap becomes too large, a competitor could feel compelled to escalate to armed conflict to rebalance the relationship. Adding to the complexity, we must account for how our competitive and deterrence activities affect our allies. At present, we have several strategies and concepts that address competition, deterrence, and assurance, but few offer much insight into what the balance should be or how to maintain that balance in an advantageous way. As a department, we are wise to establish unity of effort in addressing Russian and Chinese aggression, while understanding they require different deterrence approaches, and incorporating that thinking into professional military education at the earliest opportunity.

Third, we must rethink how we assess strategic risks and how those assessments inform our planning and execution. Following our conclusion that crisis or conflict with a nuclear-armed adversary could lead to nuclear employment, U.S. Strategic Command embarked on a revised “Risk of Strategic Deterrence Failure” assessment process to better inform our own thinking. Doing so builds the structure and muscle memory now, so if the environment changes in ways that lend themselves to deterrence failure, we are postured for expedient action. We are also using these insights to refine tailored deterrence strategies to better account for competition, crisis, and conflict.

Finally, DoD must reframe how it prioritizes the procurement of future capabilities. Our record in this regard is not stellar.5 We must ensure that all of our capabilities map to an overarching strategy. We must acknowledge the foundational nature of our nation’s strategic nuclear forces, as they create the “maneuver space” for us to project conventional military power strategically. We must transform how we think about, employ, and procure capabilities that, to this point in our history, generally have been considered “enablers,” such as space, C2, and cyber; they can be, by themselves, decisive. We must remain agile in our development, looking for ways to integrate and deploy our capabilities faster, to maintain the initiative. In short, we must pursue capabilities that preserve our competitive edge and, if called on, are decisive early, before an adversary’s stake is too great or the opportunity has passed.

While this is a sobering picture, it is not intended to discourage; rather, it is meant to highlight reality and reinvigorate a conversation across the enterprise. Our challenges are not insurmountable. Time and again, DoD has demonstrated its willingness and ability to address changing environments. We must adapt to today’s strategic environment by understanding our opponents’ threats and their decision calculus. We must also accept the gauntlet of great power competition with our nuclear-capable peers. It is through a holistic risk assessment process that we can better align national resources and military readiness to ensure strategic security. In the end, it comes back to the threat. Until we come to a broad understanding of what the threat is and what to do about it, we risk suffering embarrassment—or perhaps worse—at the hands of our adversaries.

Citation :

asia.nikkei.com

China determined to build iron ore hub in Africa as Australia goes Quad

7 - 9 minutes

NEW YORK -- There was a time when Japan, like China today, was the rising power in the East that kept military planners in the West awake at night.

"It is very certain that no other nation at the present time is spending so large a part of its revenue on naval preparations," military author Hector Bywater wrote in the 1921 book "Sea-Power in the Pacific -- A Study of the American-Japanese Naval Problem."

But Japan had a critical weakness: a lack of steel.

"Since the close of the Great War, shipbuilding in Japan has been seriously hampered by the difficulty of obtaining steel," Bywater observed in his book, which accurately predicted a naval conflict between Imperial Japan and the U.S. two decades later.

Japan had imported large quantities of American steel under a special agreement between the two governments prior to 1917, when the U.S. imposed a steel embargo that stemmed the flow to the Asian country.

"So serious has the shortage become of late that the output of tonnage in Japan during 1920 was 25% short of the forecast of 800,000 tons which had been made in January of that year," Bywater wrote. "This scarcity of steel reacted on the naval program, delaying the launch and completion of ships."

The armored cruiser Izumo, flagship of the Third Fleet of the Imperial Japanese Navy, is seen in Shanghai in 1937. Japan struggled to procure steel after the U.S. enacted an embargo in 1917. Getty Images

Chinese state planners looking to learn from history would quickly notice that the glaring vulnerability for Beijing today is its dependence on iron ore from Australia. While Beijing has tried to squeeze and punish Canberra for proposing an international investigation into the roots of COVID-19, it has been unable to wrestle itself away from Australian iron ore, which accounts for over 60% of China's imports.

As Australia deepens its connection to the Quad grouping with the U.S., Japan and India, forming a de facto anti-China tag team in the Indo-Pacific, Beijing has found it increasingly uncomfortable to depend so much on Canberra for iron ore -- the basic material behind its own military buildup.

But that dependence may very well change by 2025, says Peter O'Connor, senior analyst of metals and mining at Australian investment firm Shaw and Partners.

"They are very serious" about diversifying supply and flattening the cost curve of iron ore, O'Connor told Nikkei Asia.
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The top focus for China's diversification push is Guinea, an impoverished but mineral rich country in West Africa, O'Connor said. A 110 km range of hills called Simandou is said to hold the world's largest reserve of untapped high-quality iron ore.

Commodity watchers have known of Guinea's potential for many years, but the lack of infrastructure has hamstrung such development efforts. A roughly 650 km railroad would need to be built from scratch, as well as a modern port from which the iron ore would be shipped.

Cost calculations have always discouraged potential entrants, such as Rio Tinto. But Beijing has more incentive to carry out the project than mere return on investment calculations, as China needs to avoid the fate of Japan in the early 20th century.

"Infrastructure is a function of time, money, the willingness to invest and, more importantly, the capability," O'Connor said.

China is building railroads around the globe through its Belt and Road Initiative and has no shortage of experience.

Engineering machines from China's Sany wait to be exported to Guinea at a seaport in Yantai in east China's Shandong province on March 19. (FeatureChina via AP Images)

But what about the funding?

China currently buys 1 billion to 1.1 billion tons of iron ore yearly from third parties, O'Connor said.

"For every $1 the Chinese can lower the long-term iron ore price ... that's $1 per ton times a billion, so a billion dollars of saving per year," he said. "It's not just about diversity, it's about lowering the price. It's not about the return on equity or return on capital of the actual investment, it's more about the benefit of the longer-term structure of the price."

The long-term trajectory envisions the price of iron ore dropping to around $60 per ton from around $160 currently, according to market views.

The project to develop Simandou has been split into four blocks, and China holds either a direct or indirect stake in every one of them. The area holds an estimated 2.4 billion tons of ore graded at over 65.5%.

"Extraction of Simandou's iron ore reserves would transform the global market and catapult Guinea into an iron ore export powerhouse alongside Australia and Brazil," Lauren Johnston, a research associate at the SOAS China Institute of the University of London, told Nikkei.

If China unlocks Simandou's reserves and drives a drop in international iron ore prices, "it could see selective commodity markets increasingly driven by intra-developing country dynamics," Johnston said.

China would find such waters easier to navigate than having to do business with Quad member Australia.

Guinea is this year's chair of the "Group of 77 plus China" at the United Nations, a grouping of 134 developing countries that form a large voting bloc China can depend on. Guinea has actively made statements on behalf of the group since assuming the chairmanship in January.

Johnston predicted that China would be pleased if progress on Simandou were achieved ahead of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation to be held in neighboring Senegal this year, the first time the Beijing-led gathering -- held every three years -- will be hosted by a West African country.

Guinean President Alpha Conde attends a 2018 dinner at the Orsay Museum in Paris. China was quick to congratulate him after his reelection in October 2020, despite accusations from the opposition of fraud. Reuters

As if to reflect Beijing's determination to see this project through, China was quick to congratulate Guinean President Alpha Conde on his reelection in October, despite accusations from the opposition of fraud. The election came after Conde altered the constitution, letting him run for a third term.

On March 4, the first batch of China-donated COVID-19 inoculations arrived in Conakry, Guinea's capital, making the nation one of the first to receive vaccine assistance from China. Foreign Minister Ibrahima Khalil Kaba was at the airport to receive the gift, with Chinese Ambassador Huang Wei by his side.

"I believe that with the support of China, Guinea will surely overcome the epidemic," Kaba said, according to the Xinhua News Agency.

The website of the Chinese Embassy in Conakry shows that Huang is a regular visitor to Kaba's office.

"It's not a coincidence," O'Connor said. China is "preparing the pathway" to develop Simandou, with an expeditious 2025 timetable, he said. "That would seem stretched if you're talking about a Western producer in Australia or Brazil, but it's entirely plausible that China could be producing in that time frame."

Simon Frankel Pratt / Jamie Levin - Foreign Policy a écrit:

Vaccines Will Shape the New Geopolitical Order

The gulf between haves and have-nots is only growing.

This handout picture released by the Chilean Ministry of Health shows airport workers as they unload a shipment of COVAX AstraZeneca vaccines against COVID-19 in Santiago on April 23

The pandemic has vastly exacerbated the global north-south divide, with wealthy Western states moving steadily toward herd immunity while a majority of Africa, Asia, and Latin America wait for vaccines to trickle down. Only a small number of countries produce their own coronavirus vaccines, but the rest of the world depends on them for their immunizations. This raises the specter of a new geopolitical arrangement—one in which patron-client relationships are determined by the asymmetry in vaccine supply versus demand.

Already, there are strong indications that vaccine have-nots are vulnerable to diplomatic coercion and enticement. Russia and China have begun supplying vaccines in exchange for favorable foreign-policy concessions, as has Israel. Western countries, meanwhile, are focused on their own domestic vaccination programs—although the United States has recently declared its intention to offer vaccine aid to hard-hit countries, especially India.

For the non-vaccine producers, there’s always the market—and at first glance, that has worked out for some. The European Union has begun to round the corner, administering millions of doses among its 27 member states. Israel continues to be an early success story; rather than employing its own considerable pharmaceutical base, it has imported millions of Pfizer-BioNTech doses and administered them rapidly and efficiently. And, despite having no domestic production capacity, Canada is now third for vaccination rates for the top 34 largest countries, behind the United Kingdom and the United States. Its tens of millions of doses have all been imported from Europe and the United States. Similar success stories can be found in Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain.

However, these market success stories are largely confined to preexisting and intense trade relationships between wealthy and advanced industrial economies. Rates of vaccinations in most other countries continue to be very low, and notwithstanding the U.S. pile of AstraZeneca doses, this is a result of supply limits. Intellectual property laws and infrastructure constraints mean a near-total monopolization of production capacities in a small handful of countries and a hierarchy of trade advantages and preferences in which a handful of non-producing countries receive priority while others are left wanting.

To overcome these challenges, the World Health Organization set up COVAX, an initiative to coordinate vaccine research and license production in order to guarantee fair and equitable distribution worldwide. To date, however, these efforts have fallen desperately short. Few vaccines have been distributed through this collaborative effort. Instead, facing domestic shortages, the EU and the United States have imposed restrictions on vaccine exports, limiting supply.

But while the United States, Canada, and Europe are still focusing on their own domestic vaccination drives, other vaccine producers are willing to exploit global demand and use their own supplies as a diplomatic instrument.

China and Russia have both actively engaged in vaccine diplomacy, linking vaccine exports to policy concessions and favorable geopolitical reconfigurations. In February, Russia brokered the release of an Israeli citizen held in Syria in exchange for Israel financing Sputnik V vaccines to be sent to Syria. Russia has similarly supplied vaccines to Central and Eastern European countries, drawing them closer to its orbit.

China has declared that its Sinovac and Sinopharm vaccines are a “global public good” and has begun supplying them to nearly 100 countries, in many cases at no cost. Some of this seems intended to rapidly undercut and abort deals that states have made with Pfizer through earlier shipments and, potentially, bribery of local officials. Meanwhile, new leaks indicate that China demanded changes to Paraguay’s position on Taiwan and successfully pressured Brazil to open its 5G market to Huawei as preconditions for receiving vaccine shipments.

If this is a seize-the-moment, one-time thing, then Russia and China will likely come out ahead. India, too, once it has confronted the rapidly escalating second wave. If boosters or regular vaccinations are not needed more than once every several years, then the world is unlikely to see a significant geopolitical reorientation. But if a yearly shot is needed, as leading epidemiologists have warned may be necessary, it could be another story.

One of the main hegemonic goods that aspiring powers provide is national security. Geopolitical dependencies have typically manifested from the provision of military instruments through arms deals, bases, and collective security commitments. During the Cold War, for example, vast quantities of weapons, training, and troops flowed into the global south as the United States and the Soviet Union competed for client states and as those client states opportunistically sought the most generous patron. While these flows have since diminished, they do still continue. In the current market for this good, the United States sits at the top, supported by a few allies. Russia dominates within a small region of satellites, and China seeks the same, with mixed success but obvious aspirations.

In the global pharmaceutical market, things look different. While still a major player, the United States faces stiff competition from several potential rivals. In Western Europe, Germany and the U.K. enjoy disproportionate influence, as does Russia in its former spheres of influence, Central and Eastern Europe. China and India both have massive production capacity and, most importantly, dominate export markets for generics outside the West. And, despite being a relatively small regional power, Israel also has vastly more significance than its size would indicate as another leading supplier of generics.

If demand for vaccines remains high in the long term, competition among these states to become the world’s dominant suppliers will result in a very different global balance of power from today’s.

While home to vaccines produced by the likes of Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca, and Johnson & Johnson—all now household names and whose vaccines are considered more efficacious—governments of these states have demonstrated a reluctance to supply doses to much of the rest of the world at the expense of domestic vaccination rates. The United States and the U.K. have exported almost none, and the EU is clamping down. They have similarly been unwilling to waive patents, allowing for production of these vaccines where they are most needed. This suggests that the United States and the EU are slow to fully exploit the geopolitical opportunities of vaccine diplomacy or at least are not willing to do so with the same alacrity and enthusiasm as other states. That may change as time goes on, however, and the result will be worsened inequities within already inequitable trade relationships between these countries and the global south.

When it comes to Asia, the focus may be mostly on Taiwan, where pandemic diplomacy has been particularly intense. China has attempted to exploit the pandemic to isolate the island, and Taiwan has moved to thwart those attempts through its own diplomatic initiatives—including promoting its coronavirus successes. In particular, China unsuccessfully sought to link vaccine provision to cooler relations with Taipei, in the case of Paraguay. Instead, India stepped in to provide vaccines—at the request of Taiwan. While China might repeat such moves in the future, India’s influence will rise if vaccine provision becomes an essential and long-term geopolitical good. It also shows that Taiwan is not without powerful patrons and that the ongoing regional competition between China and India may offer protection.

But perhaps surprisingly, the greatest beneficiary may be Israel. Teva Pharmaceuticals, the world’s single-largest producer of generic drugs, is already poised to begin manufacturing licensed doses of the vaccines. Headquartered in the Israeli city of Petah Tikva, the company may not be the dominant supplier for the rich markets of Europe and the United States, but it is an essential source of affordable medicine for much of the global south and would massively boost Israel’s geopolitical influence as well should ongoing SARS-CoV-2 vaccine provision become essential to the world’s health. Israel has reportedly offered doses to Honduras, the Czech Republic, and Guatemala in exchange for moving their embassies to Jerusalem.

The global north has begun to crawl out of the crisis with the machinery needed to provide boosters as necessary—while the global south continues to battle an increasingly ferocious plague. Nevertheless, the pandemic may prove geopolitically costly even for these wealthy countries as former allies or clients realign with current adversaries and as previous partners rise in power and assertiveness.

The EurAsian Times a écrit:

Dragon On Fire – Why China Would Be Furious With US-Russia Summit In Geneva

The US and Russia seem to be returning to the path of pragmatism despite their bilateral relations reaching ‘the lowest point’ in recent years, however, both Putin and Biden could have one ‘common goal’ — checkmate China.

This, in nutshell, appears to be the real meaning of the first summit between US President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Geneva on June 16.

It is to the credit of the new Biden Administration that it is receptive to the school of thought that says that an over-confrontationist policy based on sanctions against Russia will not work; instead, it will push Russia deeper into the camp of China, the number one adversary of the United States at the moment.

That explains why the initiative for the Geneva summit came from President Biden. Shortly before leaving for Europe to attend the G-7 meet, “he gathered in the Roosevelt Room at the White House for a prep session with a group of outside Russia experts — including officials from the Trump and Obama administrations — to discuss a range of views about how to deal with Putin”, reported NBC News.

Secondly, he created the atmosphere further conducive by waiving sanctions on the company overseeing the Nord Stream 2 natural-gas pipeline that a Russian-led consortium is constructing under the Baltic Sea to Germany, bypassing the existing network through Poland and Ukraine. And Biden did this by ignoring the bipartisan Congressional opposition that such a move would be a major strategic boost for Putin in Europe. That Germany itself is very keen on this project seemed to have helped the US President on taking this bold decision.

Takeaways From Geneva Summit

But then, the Geneva summit did not result in any notable breakthrough in US-Russian relations, except the agreement that the two countries will have their respective Ambassadors return to each other’s capital.

https://twitter.com/mfa_russia/status/1405131295982817281?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1405131295982817281%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Feurasiantimes.com%2Fdragon-on-fire-why-china-would-be-furious-with-us-russia-summit-in-geneva%2F

Otherwise, the nearly three-hour talks between Biden and Putin in their first summit meeting saw them agreeing to disagree on most of the issues in their bilateral relations – cyber-attacks, election interference, Russia’s increased aggressive behavior toward Ukraine, and the crackdown on political opposition in Russia.

But they promised to keep on talking and begin “consultations” on cyber issues that have bedeviled their ties the most in recent years, with the US complaining of Russian cyberattacks on American agencies and Russia responding that most of the cyberattacks came from the USA and Canada.

In a sense, much was not really expected to come out from a meeting, whose importance lay in starting the process of talks between the US and Russia. This explains why in their separate post-summit news conferences, Biden described the tone of the discussions as “good, positive” and Putin said it was “constructive” and there was a “glimpse of hope” regarding mutual trust.

Howsoever, one may point out the decline of Russian power in recent years, there are some hard facts that cannot be ignored. And these are that no country other than Russia is capable to destroy the United States in, what experts say, 30 minutes, thanks to Russia’s formidable nuclear arsenal, that there is Russia’s geographic centrality as a continental sized country in Eurasia with abundant natural resources, that Russia possesses one of the world’s most highly skilled manpower, and that Russia is a key global player with a Security Council veto in the United Nations.

Focus On China

In fact, with the exception of China, no country affects more issues of strategic and economic importance to the United States as does Russia, be it in Europe or the Middle East, or Central Asia.

Post-Cold War history has shown that every US President, Bill Clinton onwards, has tried to build better relations with Russia but failed. And that is because, as Thomas Graham (a Distinguished Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, who served as Senior Director for Russia on the National Security Council staff during the George W. Bush administration) argues, Washington thought of turning Russia into an America-like or European-like democratic country.

Historically, Russia is proud of its centralized authoritarian system to manage its continental-sized country that is sparsely populated but multi-ethnic. It has always tried to be accepted as a major country in the world since the time of Peter the Great 300 years ago. None other than Putin had made it clear in a document called “Russia at the Turn of the Millennium” (released on December 30, 1999).

In this document, the Russian strongman had clearly outlined that he intended to return to the traditional Russian model of a strong, highly centralized authoritarian state. “Russia will not soon, if ever, become a version of the United States or England, where liberal values have deep historical roots. . . . For Russians, a strong and sturdy state is not an anomaly to be resisted. To the contrary, it is the source and guarantor of order, the initiator and driver of any change,” he wrote.

Putin or for that matter the Russian analysts do have a point when they say their legitimate national interests have been disregarded by the West in general and the US in particular after the breakup of the Soviet Union. Russia wants a multi-polar world but has been always under threats and insults such as the expansion of NATO up to the Russian border and economic sanctions.

Russians say, and again with great merits, that the US totally overlooked the history by imposing sanctions to cripple the Russian economy after Russia took over Crimea from Ukraine in 2014. Crimea was part of Russia from 1783, when the Tsarist Empire annexed it a decade after defeating Ottoman forces in the Battle of Kozludzha, until 1954. That year the then Soviet government transferred Crimea from the Russian Soviet Federation of Socialist Republics (RSFSR) to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (UkrSSR).

It was a change of administration from one part of the country to another (Ukraine was very much a part of the then USSR) for administrative reasons. People in Crimea are essentially Russian in language and culture; they do not share much with Ukrainians and love being a part of Russia, something that has been confirmed by major independent surveys. In that sense, what Russia did in 2014 was to take back what belonged to it historically, and that too after Crimean demanded to return to Russia.

Fallouts Of US Sanctions On Russia

The US sanctions against Russia over its so-called annexation of Crimea have resulted in Moscow getting closer to and strengthening Beijing, whom President Biden has called “Washington’s most serious competitor”. The Chinese military has become stronger with Russian-made systems. Russia has aided China’s commercial penetration of Central Asia and, to a lesser extent, Europe and the Middle East. It has given China access to natural resources at favorable prices.

In other words, the collateral effect of America’s actions against Russia and slighting it is the gaining of strength by China, Washington’s biggest headache at the moment.

Against this background, the Biden Administration is perhaps considering a pragmatic approach towards Russia that will “let Russia be Russia”. Such an approach is all the more understandable given the urgency that requires US-Russia convergence in two areas.

One is the arms control, particularly the extension of “New START” between the US and Russia, an agreement negotiated under President Barack Obama that reduces each country’s number of deployed nuclear weapons by 30%. Besides, it is reported that Putin wants limitation of America’s highly accurate long-range conventional systems that have the same strategic effect as nuclear weapons. On his part, Biden wants to limit Russia’s “exotic” weapons systems, like nuclear-propelled torpedoes, which are not covered by New START.

Second is the potential areas for cooperation that include limiting Iran’s nuclear program (one of Biden’s principal challenges, preventing the Afghan government from collapsing after the withdrawal of US troops, and collaborating with Putin against climate change (indeed, the first invitation of Biden to Putin was to participate in the virtual “Summit on Climate” that he had hosted on April 26).

The possibility that nuclear weapons could be used in regional or global conflicts is growing, said a newly disclosed Pentagon doctrinal publication on nuclear war fighting that was updated last year.

Citation :

Geo-tech politics: Why technology shapes European power

Juan Ruitiña
31 - 40 minutes
Summary

New technologies are a major redistributor of power among states and a significant force shaping international relations.
The European Union has for too long seen technology primarily through an economic lens, disregarding its implications for its partnerships and for its own geopolitical influence.
If the EU wants to be more than a mediator between the two real technological powers, the United States and China, it will need to change its mindset.
For the EU and its partners, the vulnerabilities created by battles over technology divide into two types: new dependencies and openness to foreign interference.
The EU and its member states need deeper engagement with the geopolitical implications and geopolitical power elements of technology.
This engagement has an external element of reaching out to partners and an internal element of ensuring close cooperation between the EU and its member states.

Introduction

The European Union has unveiled the world’s first plans to regulate artificial intelligence (AI). The publication of the rules is part of a frenzy of EU tech regulation and strategies: there is also the Digital Services Act, the Digital Markets Act, the Digital Decade, the Cybersecurity Strategy, the Data Strategy, and more. Most importantly, the AI regulation follows the implementation of another major EU technology regulation that anyone who accesses the internet has encountered many times: the 2018 General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The EU is doubling down on its role as a regulatory superpower.

Technology regulation may sound like (and, to some extent, is) a boring topic that should chiefly concern legal experts. But technology has found its way onto geopolitical battlegrounds. Throughout history, technology has not only transformed economies and societies but also been a major redistributor of power among states and a significant force shaping and reshaping international relations. New technologies can massively boost a country’s economy and, therefore, global influence. They can enable capabilities that provide a country with military advantages or even dominance. And the values and standards that tech products embody are determined by whoever manufactures them.

But the EU, for all its pathbreaking work on regulation, does not appear to have fully recognised just how geopolitical technology can be – or how geopolitical the current generation of emerging, primarily digital, technologies has become. At the 2020 Munich Security Conference (the last one before the pandemic), it was painfully obvious that the EU was widely considered to be – at best – a mediator between the two real technological powers, the United States and China.

Since then, some things have changed. For one, technological competition between the US and China is increasingly fierce. The US has imposed export controls on semiconductors, aiming to cut off China’s supply lines, and has pressed its allies worldwide to kick Chinese companies out of strategic markets, such as 5G. A recent report by the US National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence mentions China a whopping 699 times (Europe appears 93 times; Russia 64). Meanwhile, China’s central government wants Chinese AI to be the world’s undisputed leader by 2030. And Chinese President Xi Jinping is pressing for greater independence from global supply chains. A fight for technological spheres of influence is playing out before our eyes, and the rhetoric around it is getting more heated.

In Europe, there has been some encouraging movement. The EU has begun to speak more forcefully about “digital and technological sovereignty”; the European Commission has laid out a strategic vision or “digital compass”; the European External Action Service has started regarding technology, connectivity, and data flows as a key dimension of the EU’s external relations and partnership agreements; and a few member states’ foreign ministries have begun producing strategies on the geopolitical dimension of technology. More recently, the European Council has called for a “geostrategic and global approach to connectivity”. And the US and the EU are looking into increased tech cooperation – most notably in the form of the Technology and Trade Council, which they announced at their June 2021 summit.

Nonetheless, Brussels and most member state capitals remain primarily focused on the economic, social, and labour implications of technology – almost as if they believe that, by ignoring tech geopolitics, they can escape it altogether. But the technological is geopolitical. States might not need to care about who owns the technology in a market-orientated, rules-based world order governed by solid multilateral institutions that enforced international norms. They could expect market forces and open and accessible global supply chains to take care of their technological needs, be it in the production of semiconductors or the construction of global networks to connect users to the internet.

Technological sovereignty becomes an existential question when the global market is hijacked by state actors, multipolarity and unilateralism replace multilateralism, and great powers turn interdependencies into vulnerabilities as they seek to set up spheres of influence. European countries and their partners risk becoming playgrounds of technological competition between great powers, which attempt to coerce them into joining a bloc. Countries could become economically dependent on others for key technologies, leaving them unable to influence standards in a way that corresponds with their values and even subject to direct foreign interference. Geopolitically speaking, technology is not neutral.

This is not just about Europe standing its ground – or choosing sides – in the Sino-American competition, which is what most European analyses now focus on. It goes beyond that. In fact, Europeans largely overlook two issues.

Firstly, all EU action – and inaction – on tech has consequences that reach beyond the union. The EU has a long history of ignoring, and being surprised by, the external implications of its actions. For instance, this was the case with the Common Agricultural Policy, which – despite being devised as a way to balance the Franco-German relationship – had huge global implications; the Ukraine Association Agreement, whose dramatic geopolitical consequences were not fully anticipated by EU policymakers; and, more recently, the GDPR, whose global impact was not foreseen by EU regulators.

Policymaking within the EU is so complicated and inward-looking that little time and space is left for anticipating the impact of EU regulations on external actors or, even more ambitiously, thinking strategically about which countries or regions may want to partner with the EU to pursue similar goals. However, the sheer size of the EU’s internal market means that external actors often have no option but to comply with EU rules even if they dislike them, see them as problematic and costly to implement, or had no role in their creation. The EU rarely acknowledges ahead of time how its actions will affect non-EU states. When it does, this usually involves a positive reading of the “Brussels effect” – the idea that EU regulation, through the weight of the bloc’s market, will automatically become a model for other powers. European leaders often portray the Brussels effect as automatic, an almost magical occurrence rather than something that requires further thought. Generally, they pay little to no attention to second- and third-order effects on other players.

Secondly, the EU puts too little thought into the way in which its internal actions – or lack thereof – influence its geopolitical power, since this is a metric that rarely comes up in any European discussions. For others, AI means power: the US National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence defines its own role as being to “prescribe actions to ensure the United States wins the AI competition and sets the foundation to win the broader technology competition”. Russian President Vladimir Putin famously declared that whoever becomes the leader in AI “will become the ruler of the world”.

But the EU, and most Europeans, do not think in these terms. This is partly due to issues of competency, but even more to the way the EU sees itself: despite much rhetoric on a “geopolitical union” – and the high representative for foreign affairs and security policy’s insistence that the EU has to “learn to use the language of power” – Brussels remains largely uncomfortable with power politics. The EU’s ethos is that of a market-driven, technocratically led entity that, from the start, has left ‘high politics’ (security and defence) in the hands of member states. This means that the European Commission sees the world in terms not of power, coercion, or relative gain but as a game of market regulation. Most member states are no different: on technology, few of them have picked up the geopolitical baton. It is possible to see this as one of the many civilisational advances of the EU – and these authors are not advocating that the EU take an adversarial, competitive stance – but the fact remains that, if Europe is not interested in geopolitics, geopolitics is interested in Europe.

The European Council on Foreign Relations is focusing on this external and geopolitical dimension of the development, adoption, and regulation of technology in Europe. In this dimension, it is important – and often necessary – for things to work at home: Europe needs to improve its connectivity; support its start-ups and established firms; invest in research, talent, and digital skills; strengthen its digital infrastructure; and more. But, broadly speaking, the EU and European experts are paying enough attention to these issues. What they overlook are the geopolitical implications of technology, which are playing out on many battlegrounds and creating two main types of vulnerability.
Battlegrounds of vulnerability

Battles over technology are being fought in a growing number of arenas, and are creating ever more vulnerabilities third countries can weaponise. The following assessment, therefore, only provides a snapshot of some of these battlefields, but it explains the origins of these vulnerabilities – which, generally, divide into two types: new dependencies and openness to foreign interference.
New dependencies

Countries around the world are pursuing AI, 5G, additive manufacturing, and other new technologies primarily because they promise to yield significant economic gains. Some of the ways in which governments try to support their domestic industries are already leading to concerns over protectionism and even techno-nationalism. For example, on 5G, the effect of China’s protected home market advantage is making Chinese telecoms giants almost unbeatable in third-country markets, creating an uneven playing field.

Geopolitically, these economic divergences are less important than the dependencies that result from particular states leading – or having monopolies – on some technologies. Such dominance can empower a state to give or withhold technologies from others, to pressure them to do its bidding, or to use these dependencies to force others to align or otherwise change its foreign policy. Members of the EU need to be wary of technological dependence on non-EU providers, particularly non-democratic states – or else they will become digital colonies of others. If Europe loses ground on technologies, it could also lead to European partners finding themselves dependent on other actors, as others fill the gap left by Europeans. Achieving technological sovereignty is, therefore, crucial for states that want to enjoy foreign policy autonomy. Two forms of critical infrastructure are of particular interest to the EU in this context: 5G and submarine cables.
5G independence

Europe’s choice of vendors for the roll-out of 5G was at the centre of the first heavily and openly contested geopolitical struggle over a technological development since the end of the cold war. The US, under President Donald Trump, made the exclusion of Chinese suppliers from future European network infrastructure a test case for the transatlantic alliance. In many European capitals, Washington employed a ‘with us or against us’ logic that had a huge impact on an area previously deemed to be merely a commercial decision for European telecoms operators. The 5G debate thereby served as a geopolitical wake-up call for many EU member states in their thinking about technology. Some, however, are still refusing to make hard choices on 5G, or are even continuing to play along with Chinese connectivity strategies and initiatives.

One odd feature of the debate is that, in fact, Europe is well placed on 5G – it has two companies that are global leaders in the area (to the extent that they are unrivalled even by US suppliers) and it could move to secure its 5G independence at a relatively low cost if it allocated additional resources to the task. But, for Europeans, the debate demonstrated for the first time the importance of access to competitive tech players. And this remains an important topic for Europe, since the development of the telecoms industry is continuing with 6G.
Undersea cables

Submarine cables are essential to the functioning of all digital sectors. Ninety-seven per cent of internet traffic and $10 trillion in daily financial transactions pass through these cables. Broadly speaking, the greater the number of undersea cables and the routes they provide, the swifter and stabler the internet access for the countries they connect – and, therefore, the lower the risk of interruptions that could lead to a digital network collapse.

In the last few years, Chinese and American companies such as Huawei, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Facebook have increased their presence in the market for undersea cables linking both European and non-European Mediterranean states to parts of the world such as Asia and Africa. European companies have adapted to this situation by forming consortia to compete with American or Chinese international groups. The EU lacks an all-encompassing strategy for a sector in which individual governments are still the key players. However, an initiative such as the BELLA submarine cable – which links Europe and Latin America, and will boost data-driven business, trade, education, and scientific research between the two regions – is a good example of how the EU can get it right by using its budget to support private-public cooperation in this key area.

If the EU fails to project its power in the Mediterranean, other global players will fill this space and create dependencies for Europe and its partners. These players will be able to penetrate the digital economy of Middle Eastern and African countries, to the detriment of European economic interests. Furthermore, there are also security risks associated with undersea cables. Companies often potentially have access to the data transmitted by the cables they manage. In this scenario, the physical protection of this type of infrastructure is likely to become increasingly difficult for the EU and for all organisations involved in the sector. Physical damage to this infrastructure could be catastrophic.
Setting standards

The process of setting technology standards is a subtle way to create dependencies. These standards, once set, can be difficult or costly to change. Unbeknown to most members of the public, there is a race on to set the standards on which digital infrastructure will run. Initially, the US mostly set up and administered digital standards, either publicly or via private firms. After a while, and with the support of the EU, countries ‘multilateralised’ technical standards to include stakeholders and government actors from third countries. This has largely served European interests well. Now, as globalisation fragments and China and the US decouple, the battle over technical standards has become critical.

If the EU does not set its own standards, it will be forced to adopt standards made by others – who may not share its values. Governance of the internet, including technical governance, is becoming increasingly bifurcated; the danger is that countries will be forced to choose between adopting the standards of a US internet or a Chinese internet, and to thereby give up access to the other market.

Artificial intelligence is one area in which an important standard-setting process is currently taking place. The EU chose early on to prioritise trustworthy or ethical AI. An EU high-level expert group developed ethics guidelines for trustworthy AI in 2018, and has since made policy and investment recommendations for trustworthy AI. The bloc’s new AI regulation emphasises that it aims to become “a global leader” in the development of trustworthy and ethical AI, and concern about unethical AI is shared throughout the union.

If no ethical standards are established, AI-enabled systems could create or reinforce biases without allowing for any appeal or rectification. There might be no limitations on states’ misuse of AI to, for example, control populations. Individuals’ lives could be destroyed or severely curtailed by opaque AI-enabled systems in areas such as the judicial system, law enforcement, or credit ratings. People would be unprotected from manipulation through AI-enabled disinformation. While such developments might slightly hamper the adoption of AI, states would still likely use these systems extensively, creating an AI-enabled dystopia.

Alternatively, if the EU does not act, others will impose their AI standards Many actors, including private firms, are already working on rules for ethical AI. Should they develop and promote these rules sufficiently, the EU would be reduced to following standards that it could not influence.

As such, there is a substantial upside for the EU if it gets trustworthy AI right. By ensuring that AI developed in the union is trustworthy, Europe can provide benefits to all users of AI-enabled systems. Ensuring that all AI-enabled systems used in the EU are ethical is directly beneficial for Europeans, who can trust that their technologies will not be biased, illegal, or otherwise harmful. This is likely to encourage and, therefore, increase AI adoption rates, which one can expect to have a positive economic impact. If the EU succeeds in encouraging others to adopt trustworthy AI standards, this would further widen the circle of beneficiaries. Even better would be if the EU established itself as a leader in ethical AI, prompting others to follow its regulations. This would ensure that the ideals that Europeans value would be adequately reflected in AI systems. Furthermore, the EU could gain a location advantage – meaning that, because of its leadership on ethical AI, “AI made in Europe” would be widely seen as following the highest standards, thereby becoming a sought-after commodity.

Another area of standard-setting is data privacy. Few topics are as important to the EU’s self-image as the protection of individual privacy. The EU made history with its GDPR regulation – which has changed the way that millions, if not billions, of people engage with the internet. But guaranteeing that everybody can be free in the digital realm is an ongoing effort. Privacy is under threat from state actors and private firms, which are fighting efforts to curb their access to private data.

If the EU fails to secure data privacy, its citizens will see their data flowing out of Europe, treated according to the lowest privacy standards available, and used to feed the AI industrial development and surveillance capacity of third countries and their companies. Europeans’ fundamental rights would be damaged, and European firms would lose their competitive edge, market opportunities, and revenue.

Apps with lax data privacy standards developed by third countries – most often authoritarian states such as China – are already collecting enormous amounts of Europeans’ data, which may be used for surveillance, coercion, and aggressive marketing techniques. The EU’s failure to act would aggravate these problems. The worst-case scenarios of digital surveillance and surveillance capitalism running wild are truly dystopian. People risk being tracked in every aspect of their lives, and being influenced without realising it – be it in buying certain products or voting for certain political actors.

If the EU does not export these regulations and ensure that the global governance of data is regulated according to European-like standards, its citizens will not be fully protected. At the same time, billions of people will lose their rights to privacy. Surveillance regimes would be strengthened, and democracies weakened. This could undermine and even destroy the democratic process and embolden authoritarian regimes.
Foreign interference

Technologies can create not only dependencies but also direct ways for states to interfere with others. The EU will need to protect itself against such interference – but should also keep in mind that it may be able to utilise these tools itself.
Disinformation and securing democracy

Back in 2010, at the time of the Arab uprisings, the belief was that the internet would help democracy spread and consolidate across the globe. A decade later, Freedom House is reporting a sustained global decline in democracy, and the World Health Organization is using the word “infodemic” to characterise the influence of disinformation on the covid-19 crisis.

Contrary to the expectation that the open, horizontal, and decentralised nature of the internet would help citizens connect with each other and push for democracy, authoritarian governments have successfully mastered digital technologies to enhance their power and control over their citizens, help other authoritarian or illiberal governments control and repress their citizens, and undermine democracies. While citizens in established democracies have lost faith in democracy and supported populist or illiberal forces, authoritarian regimes have turned social media and digital technologies into effective tools of surveillance and social control, suppressing democratic opposition.

Social media companies’ business model of advertising to captive audiences and harvesting user data has led to an economy of attention that prizes emotion, increases political polarisation, and erodes trust in institutions. And, because of a lack of adequate regulation, these companies are vulnerable to foreign influence operations and electoral interference designed to fuel extremism, undermine citizens’ trust in political institutions, and suppress criticism of authoritarian regimes. However, the problems of disinformation and the use of emerging technologies for interference in the political process go beyond social networks. AI-enabled “deepfakes”, for example, have already been used to trick EU politicians, a tactic that one can expect to become an ever-greater problem.

Unless democracies curtail foreign influence operations and electoral interference, they risk decline as more and more voters lose trust in political institutions. Citizens might stop supporting democracy – at home and abroad – and human rights promotion policies, alliances of democracies, and rules-based multilateral solutions to world problems. All this could lead to a values-free EU foreign policy. At the same time, authoritarian regimes could tighten their grip on their citizens by showing them that democracy is not a model they should aspire to. If democracy and liberal values lose their pre-eminence, this will undermine the liberal multilateral order – helping authoritarian regimes capture or weaken global governance institutions. Much as authoritarian governments export AI surveillance technologies to like-minded partners and allies, the EU should, apart from protecting democracy at home, provide struggling democracies abroad with the technology to protect their public sphere and elections.
Military and defence

There have been moments in history when warfare changed because of the introduction and innovative use of new military technology. From the crossbow to gunpowder, tanks to nuclear weapons – when technologies are introduced and used in novel ways, they can have a fundamental impact on how wars are fought, militaries are organised, and strategies are developed. New technologies, particularly AI, might initiate such a fundamental change. Artificial intelligence can enable new types of military systems in everything from logistics and sustainment to cyber operations and autonomous weapons. The adoption of AI in the military realm could change the global balance of power, by giving new actors decisive military capabilities. Military AI is emerging as a new frontier for great power rivalry.

If Europe does not address the changes in warfare that AI is likely to bring about, it will become vulnerable to new forms of attack. In the worst-case scenario, Europe’s defences could be fundamentally compromised (through, for example, the erosion of nuclear deterrence). European countries’ interoperability with the US, their most important NATO ally, would be weakened and their opponents militarily emboldened. Even if it avoids this scenario, Europe will be unable to shape the debate on the use and possible regulation of AI-enabled military systems if it avoids the issue.

In contrast, by engaging with the military applications of new technologies such as AI, the EU could strengthen its capabilities, thereby helping guarantee the safety and security of its citizens. Europe’s military-industrial base could receive a boost through work on cutting-edge technology. AI-enabled capabilities could become an important area of cooperation between European companies, thereby strengthening common European defence. Working with allies to streamline the use of AI within NATO would not only guarantee a continuation of interoperability but could also improve interoperability between allied forces – through the use of AI-enabled command and control. Finally, by engaging in the debate on the military applications of AI, Europe could help mitigate the most problematic uses of systems such as lethal autonomous weapons.
What Europe needs to do

ECFR has put forward recommendations on how to address all these sources of vulnerability, from 5G and undersea cables to military AI. The EU needs to improve its data sovereignty by adopting strict regulations on data privacy and ensuring that these are exported to countries and companies that access Europeans’ data. EU member states should create an ecosystem in which smaller 5G players that focus on software and virtualisation can scale up their operations and cooperate effectively with larger European and US companies. The EU should heavily invest in exporting technologies and practices that protect democracy and help achieve technological sovereignty, and in learning from others’ experiences in this realm.

But more important than these individual fixes is deeper engagement with the external implications and geopolitical power elements of technology. This engagement has an external element of reaching out to partners and an internal element of ensuring close cooperation between the EU and its member states.
Outreach to partners

The EU needs a global strategy for improving its partners’ access to reliable and safe technology. Otherwise, the bloc will leave a space that others will fill. Democracies would be further weakened and impoverished. Autocracies would thrive. Europe would be wrong if it thought it could set out its own rules and standards and let the rest of the world adapt. The Brussels effect, by which Europe silently exported its data privacy regulation to the rest of the world, will not easily repeat itself. GDPR happened when technology was still under the geopolitical radar. Now, technology has been (geo)politicised and both governments and industry actors know how closely intertwined power, technology, and regulation are.

Both China and the US are reaching out to third countries. The US has programmes such as The Clean Network, which aims to help its allies end their use of Chinese 5G. The Chinese Belt and Road Initiative includes a digital component. And Chinese firms, with governmental support, export facial recognition and surveillance techniques to autocracies around the world.

The challenge for the EU is in working with like-minded countries and multilateral bodies – such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), but also regional arrangements such as those in Latin America, Africa, and the Indo-Pacific – to develop fair, open, and values-driven technological standards. The EU should deploy the incentive of access to its digital market to strengthen its alliances. The bloc should use its financial institutions to incentivise EU firms to invest in countries that are seeking to adopt these critical technologies but, at the same time, want to reduce their technological dependence on China. The EU should also consider establishing a comprehensive and compelling tech package that would allow it to become a geopolitical player in the area. This ‘tech compact’ should include: upgrading existing or prospective trade agreements to grant improved access to the EU digital services market to countries that comply with EU standards in areas such as data flows, privacy, and AI; offering technical assistance to governments and parliaments wishing to align with the EU on regulatory issues; offering funding guarantees for connectivity investments; coordinating positions on technical standards in multilateral organisations; and offering cyber security and democracy-protection packages. In contrast to other great powers, whose tech offers are often based on coercion and the exploitation of weakness, the EU should stand for a principled approach based on partnerships, mutual interests, consent, and solidarity. Also, as it is already doing, the EU should continue scanning its internal market for vulnerabilities in critical technological sectors, identifying high-risk vendors, and ensuring reciprocity in market access to these technologies for countries that restrict or curtail digital trade.

It will not be sufficient for the EU to merely approve internal regulations in the expectation that others will accept them, such as in the case of the GDPR. For example, the bloc is already operating on bilateral agreements with like-minded countries such as Japan to implement data privacy clauses that ensure the free and safe flow of data. But this is not enough in itself. The EU should aim higher – through multilateral institutions such as the OECD and the International Monetary Fund, or through groupings such as the G20 – to establish a global data privacy regime whose standards are valid for most democracies, if not for all countries (as those ruled by authoritarian regimes may opt out).

A key component of this is the transatlantic relationship. A major agreement on data privacy with the US would help break the current dynamic of regulatory fragmentation, helping both the country and the EU jointly take on China and other illiberal regimes.
The importance of cooperation between the EU and its member states

The European Commission and other Brussels institutions are positioning the EU as a powerful actor in the global debates about tech regulation. But not all member states appear to feel the same sense of urgency. As of today, 21 member states have now published AI policy documents in which they identify areas of focus, develop recommendations, and decide funding priorities. These strategies reveal that most EU member states primarily see AI through an economic lens. Almost all the strategies were written by or under the leadership of economics ministries (or variations thereof) or, less often, ministries of innovation. With very few exceptions – such as France – most EU countries do not engage with the challenges posed by the way that the development and use of AI might affect the international balance of power. Even fewer discuss or even mention the impact of AI on defence.

If the EU moves forward on technology issues without the support of its member states, it risks losing credibility and the capability to influence others. Worse, it could leave empty spaces in Europe that external actors fill.

But, if the EU and its member states work together closely on technology issues, the bloc will be strengthened – and will lead by showing that its rules and regulations, such as those on privacy or trustworthy AI, work at home. In this, the EU can benefit from member states’ diplomatic reach in various regions.

It is crucial for Europe to recognise and consider the international second- and third-order effects of any actions it takes in the technological space. It needs to acknowledge that these actions have an impact on its geopolitical power. They influence the EU’s soft power as a role model, its positioning relative to other major players’ plans, and its geopolitical room for manoeuvre.
Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the ECFR ‘tech team’ and other ECFR colleagues for their input and expertise, particularly Anthony Dworkin, Carla Hobbs, Mark Leonard, Janka Oertel, and Arturo Varvelli, as well as ECFR council members Christoph Steck and Andrew Puddephatt. They are also grateful for the support of the ECFR editorial team.
About the authors

Ulrike Franke is a senior policy fellow at ECFR and leads ECFR’s Technology and European Power Initiative.

José Ignacio Torreblanca is a senior policy fellow at ECFR and head of ECFR’s Madrid office.

The European Council on Foreign Relations does not take collective positions. ECFR publications only represent the views of its individual authors.