Win Globalization, Win AI, Rule the World
Broad framing the Superpower Brand War across the AI and globalization domains
When I wrote The Pentagon’s New Map two decades ago, I started with a database of where the US sent troops across the post-Cold War era and then I drew a line around 95% of them, yielding the equatorially-centric shape above. These areas, by all manner of measures, were less connected to the outside world than globalization’s “Core” areas (at that time to include Russia, India, China, EU, US, Brazil, Australia, Japan, etc). I dubbed this lower-latitude band “The Non-Integrating Gap.”
In my analysis, the Gap was both crisis and opportunity: by being less connected to the world and especially the global economy, Gap states were less bound by international rules and norms (and less incentivized to follow them in a system they believed was rigged against them). They tended toward weak democracies and autocracies. They represented the almost all the mass violence (overwhelmingly civil strife or government-on-citizen violence) within the system, and, on that basis, represented the “demand signal” for US military interventions in America’s then-strong Leviathan mode (right up to and including controversial regime changes).
So the Gap was a huge problem, but it was also a symptom of where globalization was penetrating most rapidly (and destabilizing traditional networks and elites). With the Core (East and West) fairly well integrated (high trade openness, strong intra-regional trade, lots of FDI flowing), it was only logical that globalization’s main integrating impulses were more N—>S than W—>E. The latter was largely completed, the former just beginning.
Jump ahead two decades, with the terror factor greatly reduced as far as the Core powers are concerned (there still, but not a worldwide driver of defense activities and thinking as now we’re back to contemplating war among great powers), and the growing N—>S integration impulse is that much clearer.
Why?
Here we get into my book America’s New Map:
Climate change disproportionally devastates lower latitudes while ironically empowering higher latitudes (ex. of agriculture shifting north with climate velocity), sending more and more migrants poleward over time.
Demographic transitions exacerbate a deep divide between a rapidly aging and depopulating North versus a still fertile and growing and younger South. The result is the migration pressures that have already twisted politics throughout the West.
Future global middle class consumption is far more centered in emerging, lower latitude economies than in Northern ones, meaning Northern powers are incentivized to integrated southward out of the profit motive (superpower brand wars, as I dub it).
All three of these changes are huge structural shifts. Together they compel a new international economic order (NIEO) of the sort long sought by the developing world (back to 1960s and 1970s). But that demand arrives as the advanced West retreats in a confluence of negative dynamics linked to the fact that the world is now a far more competitive landscape: xenophobia, anti-immigration fervor, racism, religious intolerance, ethno-nationalism, trade protectionism, etc.). In the US, this back-to-the-future instinct is best represented by White Christian Nationalism, Trump, and MAGA — each with their zero-sum view of economics and globalization in general (There is only so much wealth in the world and I’m protecting mine!).
How does this translate into our foreign policy? Sanctions, sanctions, sanctions.
The West correctly estimates that it has tremendous power in its global demand (consumption), so, to deny other economies access to those vast markets … that is a serious punishment (e.g., recently applied to Russia which is now forced to sell all the same exports as before but to China and India at radically reduced prices/profits).
Per a WAPO story today, America now sanctions a great portion of the world (>1/3rd):
[Sanctions] have become an almost reflexive weapon in perpetual economic warfare, and their overuse is recognized at the highest levels of government. But American presidents find the tool increasingly irresistible.
By cutting their targets off from the Western financial system, sanctions can crush national industries, erase personal fortunes and upset the balance of political power in troublesome regimes — all without putting a single American soldier in harm’s way.
Again, I get it. In a world in which economic powers rise primarily through export-driven growth, denying declared bad actors access to Western markets is a profound tool.
But it’s also highly counterproductive in an era that incentivizes/demands North-South trade and investment integration for all of the reasons cited above:
We need to be in the business of keeping resilient people in-place within resilient and growing economies across the Global South, lest climate change drive them North in desperation in overwhelming numbers (already happening).
We need to be able to access future concentrations of cheap labor — also overwhelmingly found in the Global South over coming decades as demographic dividends “shift” from SE Asia to S Asia to the Middle East and Africa (India’s ongoing graduation into superpower-dom reminding us how that works to the global economy’s advantage).
We need to meet that rising demand of a rising majority global middle class — again, centered more in the South than North.
This is where the West’s mindset on de-globalization and de-coupling and de-risking is, in many profound ways, ultimately self-defeating: We assume we can “stick” developing markets into proper developments/growth/politics pathways through this access-denial, sanctions-heavy approach. Meanwhile, China offers one big fat “carrot” in the package of the Belt & Road Initiative-seguing-into Beijing’s follow-on offering of vast surveillance capabilities as part of its IT-networking Safe Cities/Smart Cities brand (super cheap smartphones, 5G at discount, then targeting the Internet of Things [IoT] and the AIoT [AI of things]).
That means, while the US and West play this period of North-South integration in a super passive-aggressive mode (No trade for you!), the rising/risen East is going full-steam ahead on meeting that rising global middle class demand, and, on that basis, capturing all those markets, all those consumers, all that consumption, all that info-sphere, all that big data, and all that AI that can be generated by all of that big data (my notion of China’s quantum grand strategy).
This is what OpenAI’s Sam Altman is now warning against in his WAPO op-ed of today:
Who will control the future of AI?
That is the urgent question of our time. The rapid progress being made on artificial intelligence means that we face a strategic choice about what kind of world we are going to live in: Will it be one in which the United States and allied nations advance a global AI that spreads the technology’s benefits and opens access to it, or an authoritarian one, in which nations or movements that don’t share our values use AI to cement and expand their power?
There is no third option — and it’s time to decide which path to take. The United States currently has a lead in AI development, but continued leadership is far from guaranteed. Authoritarian governments the world over are willing to spend enormous amounts of money to catch up and ultimately overtake us. Russian dictator Vladimir Putin has darkly warned that the country that wins the AI race will “become the ruler of the world,” and the People’s Republic of China has said that it aims to become the global leader in AI by 2030.
These authoritarian regimes and movements will keep a close hold on the technology’s scientific, health, educational and other societal benefits to cement their own power. If they manage to take the lead on AI, they will force U.S. companies and those of other nations to share user data, leveraging the technology to develop new ways of spying on their own citizens or creating next-generation cyberweapons to use against other countries.
This is where my concept of a “superpower brand war” for the heart and souls of that global majority middle class becomes so crucial: we are in a race with authoritarian superpowers to see who can capture more of the world’s big data and the best way to do that is to spread your IT-connectivity networks around the planet, ostensibly to meet that at-large demand function but additionally — and ultimately — to capture those nations within your own data-ecosystem and THEN use all the big data you are then able to hoard to impose ever more behavioral/ideological control over those nations, governments, people, consumers while — naturally — turbo-charging your development of AI.
Win Globalization, Win AI, Rule the World
That is the superpower brand war and China gets it. Hell, China pioneers it while we obsess over who’s making the chips in yet-another access-denial strategy.
In our current mindset, the US sees the Global South as a problem to be tamed whereas China sees it as an asset to be exploited: we sanction while China brings them online; we deny demand while China meets it; we enforce disconnectedness while China forges connectedness — reaping all the benefits (to include AI development) that comes with this go-global (and very go-like) strategy.
America sees the world in terms of crisis, but China sees the world in terms of markets to be captured.
In short, the US is choosing to lose this competition with China because we are freaking out so desperately over how globalization now changes us MORE than we can steer it — as in decades past.
In grand strategic terms, THIS IS OUR PRIMARY PROBLEM.
