The Wires of War: Technology and the Global Struggle for Power

Abstract

T he defining feature of contemporary international politics is the global power struggle taking place at the intersection of technology and geopolitics. This power struggle has given way to a new ‘tech cold war’ between the United States and China. While the United States remains at the forefront of technological innovations, China has through decades of investment in gaining technological knowhow—at times through questionable means as well as through research and development—begun to compete with the best in the world. The quest for technological innovation and gaining an edge over competitors, however, does not remain confined to the United States and China, as other big and middle powers too have indulged in the struggle for acquiring advance technology both through technology transfer and innovation. There is a growing set of literature, coming especially from the United States, that tends to project this quest for technological superiority into the Cold War paradigm of bloc politics and struggle between democracies and authoritarian States for upholding the liberal international order. Jacob Helberg’s The Wires of War: Technology and the Global Struggle for Power is one such work that divides the world into the two camps focused on a rather self-fulfilling prophecy of a tech cold war. Helberg’s book essentially revolves around two competing narratives around technology: one, the United States’ liberal democratic narrative; and the other of the China–Russia authoritarian narrative. According to the author, the authoritarian techno bloc, which is characterised by opaqueness, centralisation, technology-based mass surveillance, State-sponsored attacks on democratic political systems and disinformation warfare, is an existential threat to the liberal democracies and the liberal international order. Helberg argues that today there is a war happening between liberal democracies and authoritarian States. This war is not a direct/hot war but an ambiguous, asymmetrical, indirect ‘grey’ war. He explains this grey war taking place at two levels; one is the battle for data and information including software, and the other is the quest for hardware and technological infrastructure like undersea cables and so on (p.19). Although the idea of a ‘grey war’ is not new and has been part of military strategies for a long time, it was a key feature of the Cold War period wherein the Strategic Analysis, 2023 Vol. 47, No. 2, 177–179, https://doi.org/10.1080/09700161.2023.2191418