Recent events in the domains of technology and innovation, and in geopolitics, confirm the main themes discussed in this book. Artificial intelligence (AI) continues to power global markets in finance and weapons systems. OpenAI is raising funds at a company valuation of $90 billion (on sales of only $1 billion). The leading supplier of SCs for high-end AI applications, Nvidia, has achieved a market valuation of $1 trillion. Amazon has invested $4 billion in a small early-stage AI company called Anthropic. In our Cold War 2.0 era, AI is rapidly insinuating itself into every nook and cranny of society, including the military.
Drones, both air-based and more recently naval ones deployed in the Black Sea, have become indispensable to both sides in the Russian-Ukrainian War. Mindful of this new battlefield reality, the United States military recently announced the “Replicator Program,” which will respond to the pacing threat posed by China in the Indo-Pacific by building in a matter of eighteen months literally thousands of AI-driven drones that will operate under the sea, on the water’s surface, on land, and in the air. The Pentagon has for some time used AI in intelligence gathering and reconnaissance, with the help of companies like Palantir. The new emphasis is on using AI for active war-fighting operations, relying on a new generation of AI companies like Shield AI, Skydio, Anduril, and Kratos, which will team up with established defense contractors like Lockheed Martin and RTX (formerly Raytheon) to build lethal weapons infused with AI capabilities, including autonomy.
Once the new AI weapons systems are developed, their production at scale will be the critical challenge—in 2022, Shield AI made only 38 drones. This level of unit output won’t suffice even for a day when the Ukrainians are burning through about 10,000 drones a month. A core lesson of the war in Ukraine is that kinetic military conflicts involving major powers don’t end quickly, and once they continue for more than a month, then industrial capacity to produce sufficient ongoing weapons re-supply becomes a critical factor between success or failure of the campaign.
The Russians are also feeling the squeeze of insufficient weapon-making capacity, and are turning to two lesser, but important, autocratic partners for assistance. Moscow has rekindled its relationship with North Korea, which began sending the Russians large volumes of artillery ammunition, even though what Russia will give in return will likely breach the UN sanctions on North Korea that Russia itself agreed to. When the chips are down, autocrats ignore the rules-based international order with even greater impunity. Russia has also come to rely heavily on Iran for drones, both buying them from the theocratic autocracy and having Tehran help Moscow build a factory in Russia to produce them in greater volume. Iran’s role in the Axis of Autocracies is increasing in other important ways as well. For example, Iran supplies weapons and military tech expertise, and significant financial resources to Hamas, all of which was evident when Hamas attacked Israel in October 2023. Hamas runs the Gaza territory (from which it launched the attack on Israel) as its autocratic fiefdom, having driven the Palestinian Authority from the enclave years ago. The senior political leadership of Hamas also had three meetings with senior Russian officials prior to the attack. Cold War 2.0 is a global conflict indeed.
The geopolitical contours of Cold War 2.0 also became clearer when China recently hosted the autocrat of Syria for a state visit. Moreover, neither Putin nor Xi attended the G20 meeting in New Delhi, nor the United Nations in New York for the annual leaders summit, which indicates where their priorities are nowadays. The essential battle of Cold War 2.0 is the push by the autocrats to topple the rules-based international order, and the ability—and hopefully willingness, resolve, and stamina—of democracies to resist this dangerous effort by the autocracies. The new reality of Cold War 2.0 and what needs to be done was captured well by Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida when he stated that: (A) the rules-based, free and open international order based on international law is in grave crisis, with Russia in Ukraine, Hamas in the Middle East, China openly trying to deny the international order in the East China Sea and the South China Sea, and with authoritarian narratives penetrating some democracies; and (B) that as the two largest democracies, the United States and Japan must demonstrate that democracy offers the best model for prosperity, stability, and security. Well said by one of the stalwarts of the globe’s democracies!
Xi Jingping is staying close to home partly because of China’s domestic difficulties. The Chinese economy is in the doldrums, beset with major structural challenges. When recently youth unemployment in China began to exceed 20 percent, Beijing promptly stopped putting out further statistics on this metric. The Chinese government has also criminalized the disclosure of certain basic data about the Chinese economy, essentially making investment in China by foreign companies very difficult. On a recent visit to Beijing, the US Secretary of Commerce, Gina Raimondo, noted that American companies now consider the Chinese market as “uninvestable.” This amplifies the technological decoupling that is ongoing between the world’s leading autocracy and the democracies.
Similar information and freedom-suppressing autocratic tactics also characterize Putin’s domestic information space, where the opposition activist Vladimir Kara-Murza was given a twenty-five-year sentence in a Siberian labor camp for daring to question Russia’s military actions in Ukraine. Russia’s months-long unlawful detainment of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich continues, without a single shred of evidence of wrongdoing being revealed to the outside world. Many of the infamous Russian practices against dissidents implemented during Cold War 1 have been revived with gusto for the current one.
For the democracies, a very important Cold War 2.0 diplomatic breakthrough was registered recently when US president Biden hosted the leaders of Japan and South Korea at a precedent-setting summit in the US, in order to build a powerful tripartite common front in the face of Chinese, Russian, and North Korean threats in the Eastern Pacific. It’s not quite a PATO, at least not yet, but closer cooperation between Washington, Tokyo, and Seoul will advance the cause of deterrence in East Asia, including indirectly on behalf of Taiwan, a very important objective of Cold War 2.0. Industrial capacity in weapons production, though, is an important question for these four democracies, as the Japanese announced they will jointly produce a sixth-generation jet fighter with the United Kingdom and Italy (and not with the United States). This aircraft is the one that will follow the largely American-made F-35 fifth-generation fighter aircraft, of which the Japanese have bought about 150. The Japanese want more industrial benefits from their next large (and very expensive) fighter aircraft program, and they want to be much more self-sufficient in case the US takes an isolationist turn in the coming years or decades.
Isolationism is indeed raising its ugly, unhelpful head in the bowels of the US Republican Party. Leading candidates for the Republican nomination for the November 2024 presidential election are calling for the US to cut off support for Ukraine and Taiwan. The most callous position argues that the US should cease support for Taiwan in 2028 just after the US becomes self-sufficient in advanced SC production capacity. This strategy is flawed in multiple ways, including the fact that TSMC, although it is building advanced SC production capacity in the US, is not building its most advanced SC capacity in the US—that technology is staying firmly in Taiwan.
More to the point, though, Taiwan’s multi-party politics, vibrant press freedom, adherence to the rule of law, and civil society with liberal values makes it among the strongest democracies in the world. It is entirely in the national interest of the United States, and other democracies, that Taiwan continue to be free of occupation by China, just as supplying weapons and financial aid to Ukraine directly supports US American national interest by helping Ukraine serve as a bulwark against a revanchist, expansionist Russia. Nevertheless, the core question on Taiwan remains: if China attacks the small island nation, will the US come to Taiwan’s defense, not merely by supplying weapons, but by sending in American land, sea and air forces?
In a recent poll taken in the US, only 37 percent of persons polled said they supported such an action, while 22 percent said no, and a whopping 41 percent answered they did not know enough about the topic to voice an opinion. This is extremely problematic, given that American kinetic military action against China in support of Taiwan will cost the deaths of tens of thousands of American lives in the first few weeks of the conflict (a publicly analyzed war game predicts two aircraft carriers and up to twenty other US naval vessels would be destroyed by Chinese missiles in the opening weeks of the war, notwithstanding the best air defense systems the US can muster in response). These poll results show how important it is for the leaders of the democracies, including in the United States and Europe, to explain to their publics the qualities of Taiwan, and why that amazing island nation deserves the support of democracies everywhere.
Moreover, people like Elon Musk are now chiming into the debate, in his case with the hugely uninformed comment that Taiwan is to China essentially what Hawaii is to the US. Musk’s technological and innovation bravado and success (with Tesla electric cars, SpaceX rockets and satellites, Neuralink brain/computer interface technology, and the X social media platform, formerly known as Twitter) make him arguably the most successful technology entrepreneur of our present time. Still, these outstanding tech credentials clearly do not automatically confer wisdom in geopolitics. Presumably Musk’s position on Taiwan is driven by the fact that Tesla runs a giant factory in Shanghai. Indeed, the normally omni-vocal Musk has not said a word, ever, against the Chinese Communist Party (even when Beijing caused the shutdown of the Tesla plant during Covid), though Musk rails against heavy-handed politics in America all the time. This confirms, yet again, that enablers of autocrats can be found in every country, even the United States. The democracies have their work cut out for them—including within their own borders—if they hope to prevail in Cold War 2.0.
The most significant threat to US national security, though, and indeed to America remaining a democracy, is the continued participation of Donald Trump in the nation’s political process. He now stands accused of ninety-one counts of criminal activity in four separate proceedings. While he is presumed innocent until proven guilty, a true supporter of democracy would stand aside from partisan politics while contesting these charges. Instead, he barrels ahead, seemingly hell-bent on throwing the country into political chaos in the run-up to the next presidential election. He has even implied on social media that the outgoing top officer of the US military, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, ought to be executed. Responsibility for the immense democracy wrecking ball that is Donald Trump rests not only on Trump’s own shoulders, but also on the many enablers within the Republican Party who speak nary a word against this autocrat wannabe while he attempts to break every institution of domestic and global democracy he possibly can. In truth, the greatest battle to date of Cold War 2.0 will not be fought in Ukraine, or in the Taiwan Strait, but at the American ballot box in November 2024.