Latest news with #geostrategy
Yahoo
6 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Warfare is changing by the day, but Britain is still decades behind
When Lord George Robertson led the Strategic Defence Review (SDR) in 1997, the GDP of the UK was greater than those of China and India combined. America reigned supreme, the only other superpower, the Soviet Union, having slowly dissolved after losing the Cold War eight years previously. Lord George is back as one of three leads of the latest SDR, widely expected to be published on Monday. But the geostrategic landscape is very different now. No longer can we afford to luxuriate in that uni-polar moment of Western and Nato supremacy. China, Iran and North Korea are functioning surprisingly well as a de facto alliance in supporting Russia in its war on Ukraine. And that is a real war of national survival, not the politically caveated, limited military interventions of the global war on terrorism. This is war at speed and scale, a war mixing the timeless requirements of industrial production with the cutting-edge technologies of the digital age: smart sensors, big-data, cloud connectivity, artificial intelligence, robotics. The new ways of warfare are evolving at dizzying speed. Technical evolution, the obsolescence cycle, is now measured in weeks. Dual-use technology – that with civil and military utility – is blended with more conventional munitions; decades-old assumptions are upended overnight; the ways and means of warfare are being comprehensively disrupted. Historically, this is a change that happens every century or so: Napoleon's Levée en Masse, sail to steam, the aeroplane. That a superpower's navy has, in the Black Sea, been defeated by a country without a navy is a wake up call to all. And here lies the big risk – the victor's paradox. 'Top Dogs' are loath to shed that which put them on top, that in which they have made big investments and of which they are masters. Paradigm shifts are the opportunity for smart challengers to abandon the previous, flagging chase and master the emerging world quicker than the current champions can adapt. China, especially, has had a plan to do exactly this for the last few decades, with massive investments in, inter alia, cyber, AI and hypersonic missiles to add a technological edge to the military mass it has built in parallel: its navy now has more ships than America's. It is using Ukraine, and Kashmir, as a proving ground. Russia has learned (slowly, as it is a corrupt kleptocracy) with grim determination the lessons of modern warfare – exemplified by its recent invention of fibre-optically steered drones. It also knows how to mobilise a war economy. In contrast, and despite much pumped-up rhetoric, most of Nato, including the UK, has demonstrated a reluctance to abandon the old paradigm. Yes, we have bought some drones, but we have bought them as if we were buying sophisticated manned warplanes. We may be buying them slightly quicker now, but these are percentage changes on a system that still takes years, and millions of pounds, to buy tens. Ukraine is on schedule to make four million drones this year. Allied to that is that Western militaries have mirrored a society that has become ever more regulated and risk averse. The British Army is down to 14 artillery pieces, which were bought as stop-gaps. There is still no certification and so no clearance to fire them on a UK range. Similar restrictions apply to innovative drone training – but what if one crashes? The paradox here is that by trying to eradicate every small risk we make the big one – war – more likely. Ultimately we aim to deter, and deterrence depends on credibility. Credibility hinges on the proven military capability to win and the political will to engage with force and see it through. Small forces, a limited production capacity and supply chain to rapidly expand and evolve them, and a risk averse culture that trains and employs them will not impress allies or deter enemies. The SDR's other authors alongside Lord George are Fiona Hill, a proven free-thinker, and General Richard Barrons who was one of the first to write about this changing paradigm ten years ago. Their SDR should not be read as recent reviews have been – a relative tally of platform numbers and the size of the residual, 'bonsai' military. That paradigm was already broken several defence reviews ago – tweaking it is but to fiddle with the increasingly irrelevant. The reader should ask instead: to what extent is this a root and branch reform of our now sclerotic system, and to what extent is it going to re-orientate our whole Defence Enterprise – MOD Head Office processes and accountabilities, agile adaptation and procurement, secure supply chains, rapid adoption of technological advances, expansion of reserve forces? If it charts a clear path to a revised 'theory of winning' that can credibly generate a wartime force with the mass and lethality to defeat our foes then it will be a good review. If it continues the usual horse-trading between the individual services over their peacetime structure then it will have been a missed opportunity. With the US making it clear that Europe must look after its own defence we have no safety net if we get it wrong. But America's position gives us an opportunity as well: the chance, the obligation, to show genuine leadership in Europe. Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. 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Forbes
26-05-2025
- Politics
- Forbes
A New Memoir Illuminates The Backstory Of Past US-China Relations
Insufficiently noticed is a recent book with unprecedented glimpses into the history of how the US helped open post-Maoist China to the world - and it couldn't be more timely. These days, the PRC's increasing footprint on the world stage has caught the attention of geostrategic observers concerned with power balances not just in Asia but across the continents. That's aside from Beijing's increasing leverage in global trade and technology. This book should therefore be required background reading for anyone wanting to know how China climbed out of the Cold War decades and entered the current era. 'Eastward Westward' by Professor Jerome Cohen is actually a personal memoir, a highly readable one that offers revealing windows onto multiple other crucial pieces of history than just US-China relations. Let me say upfront that, for some decades, I have known the author, now in his 90s and the father of an old friend, Ethan Cohen, a top New York gallerist who introduced artists like Ai Weiwei to America. And as in most such situations, out of respect one doesn't ask the parents of a friend too many detailed questions about their achievements, so Prof Cohen's astonishing presence in history remained largely unknown to me - until reading the memoir. That may seem a strange admission from your Forbes columnist of over 25 years, a widely published journalist about foreign affairs and co-author of two books on the Russia-China alliance. But it conforms with the reason why Jerome Cohen was so efficacious and influential - he worked quietly and tactfully behind the scenes on resolving the nuggety details of great global initiatives while politicians and diplomats got all the publicity. Cohen first enters history when, having edited the prestigious Yale Law Journal as a student in the 1950s he becomes clerk to two Supreme Court Justices in succession, one a Chief Justice, an unheard of achievement. And suddenly the reader has a glimpse of Washington at a pivotal time when the US was still simmering from the previous year's Brown vs Board of Education court precedent. Within a few years Jerome Cohen has won a Rockefeller Grant to research the laws of Communist China, an almost impossible task considering the tightly sealed status of the country in the 1960s. Cohen overcomes the virtually insuperable challenge by asking the Hong Kong police to present him with any escapee from the PRC, even those found floating in the harbor. 'I figured if anybody knew about China's legal system it would be those fleeing from justice' says Cohen. As a thirty-something he becomes a leading global expert in Chinese law and in the mid 1960s is teaching at Harvard. Over the years he expands the Chinese law department to become the East Asian Law department. The outsize influence of that department on the political affairs of the Far East has yet to be acknowledged. In 1969, he chairs a meeting of Harvard and MIT professors which produces a confidential memo to President Nixon to start secret talks with China. 'That was the origin of Henry Kissinger's famous 1971 visit', says Prof Cohen. (Kissinger had been a colleague at Harvard - the two had often discussed such a demarcate). Here then was Cohen's first great stealthy entry on his path of quietly realigning East-West relations at a fundamental level. During the next decades, he travels broadly in the Far East with his family. His wife Joan is, in the meantime, a leading cultural intellectual on the region's visual arts. At the start of Deng Xiao Ping's era she is quietly meeting top Chinese artists in Beijing in their homes to view and encourage the stirrings of independent art in China. Hence the family's friendship with Ai Weiwei and his ilk. She is the first Western woman to lecture top art college students on the outside world's contemporary work. In the years before and after, Prof Cohen has expanded the East Asian Law department at Harvard to take in the most accomplished young minds of the region. They, in turn, go on to high government positions in their countries. One shouldn't forget that for a large chunk of that time, polities like South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines and the like struggled with military and autocratic leaders. Cohen's students undoubtedly helped change the political climate. Then in the 1990s, Prof Cohen again quietly enters the engine room of history, this time to thrash out a dependable commercial code for foreign investment in the PRC. He is helped by fellow lawyers, ex students and Beijing officials to lay down this most crucial of foundations. By then he is a senior partner at the law firm of Paul Weiss and brings the first heavy foreign corporation investment into China. (He later returns to academe as a law professor at New York University). From the time of Nixon onwards he helps high profile political prisoners find freedom starting with his old Yale classmate Tom Downey who joins the CIA in the 1950s, is dropped into Maoist China, gets quickly arrested and serves 18 years in prison before Cohen engineers his release. Cohen intervenes on behalf of Benigno Aquino of the Philippines, Kim Dae Jong of South Korea, Annette Lu of Taiwan, all who help guide their countries to liberal governance. More recently he helps get Ai Weiwei released from prison and the famous 'Barefoot' blind lawyer Chen Guangchen. Though doubtless still respected as a leading pioneer of their present prosperity, Prof Cohen's human rights activities have, perhaps, not endeared him to the current Beijing leadership. What then does he make of the present situation after all his years of opening China to the world? He has trenchant words against the current norm there of 'rule by law' rather than 'rule of law'. And he's a strong supporter of Taiwan especially because its example contradicts all those who argue that Western-style governance is antithetical to Chinese traditions. The chapter dealing with such questions is wonderfully titled 'The Curfew Tolls The Knell of Parting Day' from Thomas Gray's famous poem. He is ultimately optimistic about the future of China, characteristically because he feels that its young legal minds offer a reservoir of potential for guiding the country's path. But you will have to read the book for a full exposure to the chapter's wisdom and Jerome Cohen's 94 years worth of it.
Wall Street Journal
13-05-2025
- Politics
- Wall Street Journal
‘Zbig' Review: Kissinger's Chief Rival
Since the creation of the position of White House national-security adviser, more than two dozen people have filled the position. The two men best known for the job, Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski, held it in the 1970s. Both seemed straight from Hollywood central casting. They were foreign-born, Harvard-trained academics with elaborate geostrategic theories. Both dominated the administrations in which they served, and both outshined the secretaries of state with whom they worked. Kissinger has been the subject of dozens of books, but Brzezinski, his great rival, has received markedly less biographical attention. Edward Luce, an editor and columnist with the Financial Times, corrects some of this disparity with 'Zbig.' There is a lot of ground to cover, and Mr. Luce does so ably in 560 tightly packed pages. Born in Poland, Brzezinski moved to Canada when his father, a diplomat, was posted to Montreal in 1938. Brzezinski published his first major work in 1960—'The Soviet Bloc: Unity and Conflict'—and he was continually on the foreign-policy scene in one way or another from then until his death in 2017. Mr. Luce is a regular guest on the show MSNBC's 'Morning Joe,' which features Joe Scarborough and his wife and co-host, Mika Brzezinski, Zbig's daughter. The father appeared frequently on the program, showing off his quick and biting wit. In his first on-air encounter with Mr. Scarborough, on the subject of Israel, Brzezinski told the host, 'You know, you have such a stunningly superficial knowledge of what went on that it's almost embarrassing to listen to you.' That Brzezinski would be both talented and difficult was foreseeable from his childhood. While Brzezinski's Canadian classmates listed as their interests 'Hollywood,' 'Eating,' 'Telling tales' and 'Yawning'—Zbig, age 10 or 11, wrote 'Europe (foreign affairs).' His rough edges also manifested early. Brzezinski's own mother wrote in her diary when he was 6, 'Zbysio, my son, why must you be so mean, so prickly.'
South China Morning Post
08-05-2025
- Politics
- South China Morning Post
Why China has refused to back down in the face of Trump's tariffs
Trying to predict any country's international behaviour is fraught with challenges. That is even more the case when that country's political system is opaque, as is China's. We depend on clues, turns of phrases drawn from leaders' speeches, shards of evidence gleaned from people on the ground, and various theories (or biases in disguise). Advertisement We have spent much time analysing China's geostrategic ambitions. Much ink has been spilled on the Thucydides Trap , the notion of 'peak power' or the radical Project 2025 that says the China challenge 'is rooted in China's strategic culture and not just the Marxism-Leninism of the [Chinese Communist Party], meaning that internal culture and civil society will never deliver a more normative nation'. But we have spent more time on China's capabilities than sought out what China actually desires. China wants many things. Most are to some degree debatable, and reasonable people can disagree. But the one thing China has wanted for the better part of the past two centuries is quite simple – to stand up. That is, China desires to re-establish its seat at the table governing the world order, a desire that arose out of an era of colonialism that began China's slide into anarchy and autarky. The country eventually re-emerged from this, but for a long time, China's global re-emergence had an asterisk attached to it; it was conditional. To resist the Soviet threat, China had to establish rapprochement with the United States. To grow out of the planned economy, China desperately needed to draw on the managerial and financial expertise of the West and the East Asian 'tiger' economies Advertisement Even the oft-used prefix, zhongguo tese de ('with Chinese characteristics'), was premised on improving upon something invented elsewhere. This was in line with Deng Xiaoping's caution, tao guang yang hui : keep a low profile and bide one's time.
