Speaker: Shaun Riordan

(https://twitter.com/shaun_riordan)

Shaun Riordan is an independent geopolitical analyst, Shaun has over 10 years experience of advising governments and companies on the development of diplomatic strategies to manage geopolitical risk. Prior to this, Shaun spent 16 years in the British Diplomatic Service with postings to New York, Beijing and Madrid as well as stints in the Counter-Terrorism and Balkans Departments of the Foreign Office. With a Masters Degree in Philosophy from Cambridge University, Shaun has taught in the Diplomatic Academy in Armenia and in the Madrid Financial Markets Institute. He is the author of The New Diplomacy (Polity 2003) andCyber diplomacy (Polity, 2020). He is co-author of Futures for Diplomacy: Integrative Diplomacy in the 21st Century (Clingendael 2012) and the Clingendael Policy Brief “Whither Foreign Ministries?”. Most recently he has written the Clingendael Policy Brief on Business Diplomacy and co-edited the special edition of the Hague Journal of Diplomacy on the same subject. He also collaborates with the Centre of Economic Diplomacy at Wuhan University and is a consultant with Geolab at the University of Deusto in Bilbao.

The concept of grand strategy was developed in the UK and the US to capture the way in which all aspects of a country ́s power, economic and social as well as military, must be marshalled in pursuit of a country ́s foreign policy objectives. As a concept it attained primacy during the Cold War when the US developed its strategy for containing the expansion of the Soviet Union and global communism. In the Anglo-Saxon world, Grand Strategy is the intellectual architecture that lends structure to foreign policy and which helps states navigate a complex and dangerous world. It constitutes a purposeful and coherent set of ideas about what a country seeks to accomplish in the world, and how it should set about doing it. As the English strategist Liddell Hart pointed out, Grand Strategy involves synchronising essential goals with limited resources. In other words, Grand Strategy provides a framework for prioritising the use of resources and the pursuit of individual policies. The priority of individual policies, or policy initiatives, depends upon their importance to the Grand Strategy. In this sense Grand Strategy can be even more important for small nations, especially those not recognised by the international community. A superpower like the US is more effective if it does have a Grand Strategy, but its overwhelming military and economic resources allow it to survive without one. This is not true of a country like Euskadi, with only limited resources and no formal recognition by the international community. Euskadi needs a Grand Strategy, both to develop a coherent picture of where it wants to be in the world, and to ensure the effective use of its limited resources in getting there.

Grand Strategy can also be seen as the narrative a country tells about itself in the future. In this sense Grand Strategy is a creative act of national story telling which generates a narrative which political leaders and citizens can ultimately share. The narrative is not just about the country itself, its history and culture and where it wants to be in the world. The narrative must also incorporate what that country can offer to the world, what it can contribute to solving or managing problems on the international agenda. Just as humans quickly lose interest in people who speak only of their own problems or achievements, so states lose interest in those states that speak only about their own issues. This is particularly true of countries not formally recognised by the international community who do not have automatic diplomatic access, or votes in international organisations which need to be harvested by more powerful states. The key external policy objective of a non-recognised country like Euskadi should be to secure international influence, not just sympathy. The limitations of sympathy were shown by European reactions to the Catalan independence declaration. To secure influence rather than sympathy, a non-recognised country must offer something to the international community which that community is reluctant to lose. What Euskadi offers to the international community in terms of solving international problems or managing global issues should form part of the narrative of the Grand Strategy. This both ensures that Euskadi ́s resources are targeted at this element of the narrative, and that governmental and non-governmental actors focus on Euskadi ́s offer to the rest of the world.

The problem for western countries is the transfer of economic power from west to east. China is already the second economy in the world, and the impact of COVID-19 will reinforce this. But other Asian economies, which also managed COVID-19 better than the west, are also growing fast. COVID-19 also emphasised the dependence of western economies on global supply chains, many originating in China and other Asian countries, including for medical supplies. While the COVID-19 outbreak has increased pre-existing calls, especially in the US, to repatriate manufacturing and reduce dependency on these supply chains, this may prove difficult. Recreating the physical and human resources to allow significant repatriation of manufacturing production will be time consuming and costly, meanwhile dependency on supply chains will remain. COVID-19 has not caused the economic and financial crisis that now confronts the west. Economies that depend on negative central bank interest rates for sluggish growth are not healthy. Signs of economic slowdown were visible even before the outbreak of the pandemic, partly driven by the trade confrontation between the US and China, and a general tendency towards protectionism. The repeated outbreaks of the virus, the failure to control them, and the economic damage they have caused, have impacted particularly on those economies which failed to take the opportunity to reform themselves following the 2008/9 financial crisis.

Looking towards the longer term, western economies are beset by the problems of demographics and automation, and their impact on consumption and labour markets. COVID-19 has hit hard those economies with aging populations, both in health terms and economically. As the baby boomer generation suffers the uncertainties of the virus, their consumption reduces. Less wealthy successor generations do not take up the slack. The pandemic has accelerated the uptake of digital technologies by companies. Home-working identifies both weaker employees and the jobs which are unnecessary or can be automated. With many automation taboos now broken, the need to cut costs in the difficult post-covid business environment will further drive the adoption of digital and other technologies, significantly reducing the number of traditional white collar office jobs. Although new technologies will create new employment, it is not clear whether it will be sufficient to compensate that lost, nor whether the unemployed will have the necessary skills to take advantage. Automation and COVID-19 threaten to increase economic inequality, both within western states, and between the global north and global south. Governments so far have focused  little on the implications of new technologies (including for education systems) or the costs of increasing economic inequality. COVID-19 will force them to do so. Governments that are capable of developing education and social systems adequate for the new technological revolution will enjoy a significant competitive advantage.

Apart from pandemic disease, environmental issues are those which pose the greatest existential threats to mankind. Climate change, mass extinctions and environmental degradation threaten the security and stability of states, but also the long term survival of the species. These issues feature on policy agendas at international, national and subnational levels. Environmental sustainability increasingly features in city diplomacy, in which cities exchange information and best practices in the creation of “smart cities”. But environmental issues extend beyond governments to non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and companies. The international environment is the area in which the actions of non-governmental actors has been most effective. The Paris Climate Change Accords had their origins in the exchanges of data and analysis within the global networks of scientists, networks which had been built to promote scientific exchanges during the Cold War.

The climate change debate was only later picked up by NGOs and politicians. The process by which the Paris Accords were reached depended on heterogenous coalitions of governmental and non-governmental actors (scientists and corporations as well as NGOs. Although the final Accords could be signed off only at the highest level (in a meeting between President Obama and President Xi), the whole process would have been impossible without the active involvement of the broad range of non- state actors. Ironically, even President Trump ́s decision to withdraw from the Accords has reinforced the non-state aspects of the process. Various US states and cities have announced that they intend to remain within the Accords. But in doing so they cannot interact with the state signatories because this would breach the Logan Act, which gives the Federal Government exclusive competences in foreign relations with other states. Instead they must find equivalent provincial or city governments with which to interact, reinforcing, for example, city diplomacy. Despite the immediate focus on COVID-19 and pandemic diseases, neither environmental issues, nor the multi-stakeholder model of diplomacy they have promoted, are going to disappear from the international agenda.

Digital technologies have combined with other new technologies like AI, machine learning and drones to create a new domain for international competition and conflict. Once again, as in physical space, there is a conflict between different agendas. In this case the conflict is between the internet governance and cybersecurity agendas. The internet governance agenda deals with the management of the internet, and the protocols that ensure its functioning. It focuses on issues like how should internet addresses and domains be assigned, the treatment of data in transit, privacy and the protection of data, how to deal with racist and other unacceptable content and the governance of online commerce. Broadly there are two approaches to internet governance: the Free Internet Nations, who favour multi-stakeholder approaches to governance including non-state actors, and the Cyber Sovereignty Advocates, who affirm state sovereignty within cyberspace and see internet governance in intergovernmental terms. The Free Internet Nations are led by the US and Europe (although, as in other areas, US leadership has been undermined by the Trump administration). The Cyber Sovereignty Advocates are led by China and Russia. These issues are not esoteric. How the issues of internet governance are resolved impact directly on how 21st century societies function, the privacy and liberty of the individual and the success of companies´ economic models.

The cybersecurity agenda deals with the use of the internet by governments to promote their geopolitical agendas, as well as the use of the internet by non-state actors for criminal purposes. As some countries, notably Russia, use criminals as surrogates to carry out geopolitically motivated operations or disguise geopolitical operations as criminal ones (eg the NotPetya ransom-wear attacks), the distinction between criminal and geopolitical operations is not always clear. Distinctions are made between degradation attacks, which seek to generate permanent physical damage (including loss of life), disruption attacks, which seek to produce temporary damage or loss of service, and cyberespionage. State and non-state actors also use cyberspace, and especially social media platforms, for disinformation operations to undermine political discourse and destabilise democratic societies. Such disinformation campaigns can be combined with cyberespionage operations, where stolen information is released to the press through organisations like Wikileaks to embarrass political leaders and parties (eg during the 2016 US elections).

Although technical cybersecurity is necessary, it is not sufficient. Most cyber attacks take advantage of sociological rather than technical weaknesses: weak passwords, willingness to open attachments without checking the origin of emails (so-called “spear phishing” attacks) and other human failings. The tendency to leave cybersecurity to technicians rather than politicians and diplomats at an international level has resulted in a domain of geopolitical activity with no widely agreed norms of behaviour. International lawyers assert that international law does apply in cyberspace, but it is not clear what this means in practice. The UN has produced two groups of experts to examine the issue, one sponsored by the Secretary General and one by the UN General Assembly, but they have agreed precious little so far and look likely to submit contradictory reports. Efforts to agree international rules of behaviour are hampered by the reluctance of western countries to limit the scope of their cyberoperations even as they criticise those of countries like China and Russia. Possibly the most promising way forward, borrowing from the process of the Paris Climate Change Accords, will be bottom-up, multi-stakeholder negotiations focused on limited objectives, eg prohibiting cyberattacks on critical infrastructure or medical research facilities. Such bottom-up, multi-stakeholder approaches open up opportunities to influence the process to non-recognised states like Euskadi.

The growing importance of technology in international affairs has also resulted in technology itself becoming a domain for geopolitical rivalry and conflict. This is shown most clearly in the recent case of Huawei and 5G. International industrial standards ensure that new technologies are globally compatible. The agreement of common standards and protocols ensure that mobile telephones and other communications devices can be used throughout the world. Until recently these international standards were uncontroversial and the meetings to discuss them attended only by technicians and government officials from technical ministries. Given the West´s technological lead, international standards were set by American companies, or companies from their allies. This changed with 5G, especially with the key second phase which links devices for the internet of things, when the key industrial standards were set by the Chinese company Huawei. Although the US has used security concerns to argue for the exclusion of Huawei from allies´ 5G infrastructure, the real concern is hegemony over industrial standards setting. Even if countries use non-Huawei equipment, eg from Ericsson or Nokia, it conforms to standards set by Huawei. This is not a one off dispute. The Chinese are already developing 6G technologies. The industrial standards setting meetings look set to become battlegrounds in the fight for technological hegemony. There is considerable risk that this will result in technological fragmentation, with different industrial standards for different regions and a reduction in global compatibility.

A final consequence of the growing importance of cyberspace in international relations has been the development of internet companies, and especially social media and search engine companies, as geopolitical actors in their own right. This is not in itself new. In the 20th century the major oil companies were geopolitical actors, and often significant ones. The difference was that the oil companies recognised their role. Internet companies seem reluctant to do so. Facebook, for example, insists that it is simply a commercial company promoting social networking. But, like other internet companies, it shapes the international environment. Its platforms contribute to the success of online disinformation operations. Its ambition to launch its own global digital currency belies its claims of innocence. The Danish government recognised this growing importance of these companies as geopolitical actors by appointing an ambassador to the tech sector, its so called Tech Ambassador, with “embassies” in Silicon Valley, Copenhagen and Beijing (ironically, Microsoft was so impressed that it promptly poached him to be its ambassador to the EU). Other countries have been slow to follow Denmark´s lead. But this is an area of diplomatic innovation not limited by the sovereignty based constraints of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations. The Basque Government can appoint a Tech Ambassador whenever it wants.