(Photo: Julius Silver)
Motion is everything. Human nature and the tendencies inscribed into it – as well as the division of labor within society – mean that in our daily, often mundane tasks, motion is the basis of the proper functioning of both individuals as well as communities. Business, creativity, tending to all sorts of affairs, social life – all create an intermeshed system where motion is a central and indispensable element – something anglophones describe succinctly as ‘connectivity’.
We move, we connect, and in doing so, we fulfill social obligations as humans, we tend to our affairs, we progress, and we satisfy the needs of our minds and our bodies. Linked by these relations and functioning within the geographic confines of our immediate and more distant physical life, we go through our lives. Some do so to great success – others are less successful. But we all take up socially prescribed roles within society and the division of labour, the daily functioning of which guarantees the continuous operation of the society and the polity that organises it. Opportunities for personal development and social mobility ensure the individual ability to shape one’s own destiny. It is easy to forget that these opportunities are determined and enabled, to a large extent, by the existence of a social contract – in other words how the relations between society, government and the economy are shaped in any given polity.
The very same principle applies to relations between nations. The key issue to be resolved here are the rules of the road regarding strategic flows: the movement of people, the flow of goods, services, data, capital, knowledge, technology, and, in times of war, the movement and deployment of our own and allied armies and the transportation of raw materials. While strategic flows determine the fate of nations and people, it should not be presumed that by their very nature they are free from interference, frictions or limitations. On the contrary – history shows that they were stringently regulated for most of recorded human history. Take communist-controlled Poland for example. The satellite state that Poland was had been crucial for Moscow, as it ensured a strategic line of communication within the confines of the North European Plain, between the Soviet Union and the Soviet Army stationed in East Germany facing NATO forces. The Soviets could not afford to forego their political and military power projection in Poland, as doing so would effectively mean losing the outer empire along a major continental line of communication. As a result, the ability to travel was strictly regulated, as was international commerce, technology transfers and especially strict was the level of control exercised over knowledge and innovation flows.
Warsaw at night (photo: Piotr Dudek)
The Soviet Union and the countries of the Warsaw Pact were all cut off from the West and from the system of free strategic flows designed by the United States in the aftermath of the Second World War. Simply put, the world created then was based upon the maritime highway of the World Ocean, which served as a transport thoroughfare of strategic flows controlled by the dominant US Navy after it had defeated the German Kriegsmarine and the Japanese Imperial Navy, whilst two consecutive world wars wore out the declining British Empire. Washington’s status as primus inter pares in the international institutions which the US has itself created under the Bretton Woods system was an inextricably linked element of this new postwar global strategic landscape.
The system was further reinforced by the grand strategy of containment applied against the Soviet Union (as well as its satellite states), landlocked in the continental landmass of Eurasia, preventing the Soviets from securing direct access to the World Ocean. This containment strategy was formulated by George Kennan in the days immediately following the conclusion of the Second World War, and was complementary to the alliance building strategy of the US that dictated the creation of a network of alliances in the littoral zones of Europe and Asia (the Rimland), a brainchild of Nicholas Spykman. This “membrane” of US political power projection in the Rimland was a very useful toolbox in US policymaking in Eurasia – the axial supercontinent, as aptly referred to with apparent fear and reverence by Zbigniew Brzeziński.
This in turn ensured the free movement of strategic flows between the nations allied with the United States, bestowing them with an opportunity to grow and develop, while at the same time denying this chance to the strategic adversary. The end result was the economic collapse of the Soviet Union that took merely a few decades to materialise.
The unexploited potential offered by the vast spaces of inner Eurasia and its central region – the Heartland – was feared by the British geographer and one of the founding fathers of geopolitics, Halford Mackinder. Mackinder warned that it was the vast spaces of the Eurasian landmass that triggered systemic rivalries between major powers and this was the place where empires were born and where they collapsed. It is for this very reason that every US administration consistently throughout American history as a major power made a priority of establishing and maintaining a favorable balance of power in Eurasia one that would preclude the rise of regional power in one of the critical locations of Eurasia. It is precisely for that very reason that the United States fought two World Wars against a Germany and engaged in a protracted competition with the Soviets. And this is precisely why the Americans are moving ahead now to confront China.
The World (photo: Alexander Antropov)
After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the former satellite states of the Soviet empire joined the international community, with its system of free strategic flows underpinned by the power of the United States. Notably, it was a system characterised by a lack of systemic tensions and competition between major powers. This in turn allowed for the rapid onset of globalisation after 1991. Poland and other Central and Eastern European countries opened their markets to capital, commodity and technological flows, with all the consequences that came with it. Poland’s accession to the EU likewise ensured free flows of people, knowledge and data. Furthermore, Poland joined NATO, expanding the Northern Atlantic Alliance’s sphere of influence deeper into the Old Continent and much further from the World Ocean. In doing so, Central and Eastern European nations were provided with US security guarantees. Everybody should remember that guarantees to all US allies in Eurasia depend entirely on US capability to effectively project power in Eurasia in places that are far away from the US mainland and across the vast expanses of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.
In the aftermath of the last world war, the debate within the US strategic community revolved around the question of whether to project power and secure just the Eurasian Rimland, or maybe – a direct neutralising of the potential of the Eurasian Heartland should be prioritised. Ultimately, it was Spykman’s vision that prevailed, of limiting US influence to the Rimland. The establishment of NATO and the European Communities, as well as convincing US former enemies of Japan and Germany to align their grand strategies with the US within the newly established international framework, were all byproducts of this decision. While Mackinder is revered until this day by the nations of Central and Eastern Europe, the US did not heed Mackinder’s grand designs of supporting the independence of nations situated between the Black and Baltic Seas in order to counter and undermine the Soviets’ Heartland-based continental power. A division of Europe into zones of influence sanctioned in the Yalta and Potsdam arrangements was the outcome.
Free strategic flows served as a foundation of the post-cold war era of globalisation, which has reshaped the socio-economic reality of our planet and transformed it into almost a singular, intermeshed space. Allowing division of labor between societies, nations and regions, the new dispersed, digitally serviced and highly complex global supply chain was fueled by easy access to capital, exploiting comparative factors of geography. The system fostered overall prosperity and impressive capital investment returns. Geography itself gave rise to comparative advantages of some regions over others, especially those supported by strong state institutions, organised societies, and elites with strategic vision. Some regions were able to capitalise and benefit from the natural trends of globalisation and harnessed them to prosper and grow in affluence and power, thus becoming beneficiaries of the new era of globalisation. Yet there were also nations and groups within societies who ended up losing.
Strategic flows by their nature concentrate in certain places. This in turn creates an unrelenting necessity to understand the principles of geopolitics, and to implement them in practical measures by the tools of geostrategy. Some regions are simply more important than others as far as strategic flows are concerned, and it is in those places that political power should be projected, which explains why it is important for world powers to create influence and foster support for carrying through their interests. In order to simplify and help better understand this mechanism, those policies could be referred to as leveraging. Gaining a foothold and later influence within geostrategically salient places, business contacts or market access require human networking, lobbying and influence building that concentrate in pivotal locations.
(Photo: Jason Goh)
Needless to say, military power is the ultimate leverage – it is not by accident the US works diligently to retain its capability to project power worldwide. The rule of thumb here is simple; the closer any given point is located to the World Ocean (and therefore to the might of the US Navy and the amphibious capabilities offered by the US Marines) and to US military bases scattered across the Eurasian Rimland, the greater the US power projection, and, consequently, Washington’s political influence or even preponderance. Conversely, the further any given territory is from the World Ocean and the deeper into inner Eurasia, the weaker Washington’s power becomes.
In the past 30 years, this reality was lost on many, as was the necessity to think about the world in geopolitical terms or formulate geostrategic plans. For the very good reason: thanks to the US global system and security architecture, geostrategy in a way formulated itself in automated mode. The US just upheld the world system on its own shoulders – much like the mythical titan Atlas. Washington’s indisputable technological, military and economic supremacy, coupled with its status within the international institutions, provided the essential global good – security in key geopolitical regions of the world and key arteries of global trade: in the Western Pacific and East Asia, in the Persian Gulf and in Central and Eastern Europe. This in turn underpinned the rules of the road pertaining to strategic flows that have formed the backbone of globalisation. And so, Fukuyama could speak of the end of history, while scores of other scholars could hypothesise about a world free of geopolitics and nasty geopolitical reasoning, a world where “one shalt truly love thy neighbor”.
Instead, Heraclitus was again proven right that everything changes and nothing endures. Small wonder that the conviction of the inevitability of globalisation is now being questioned – as Mackinder wisely predicted a hundred years ago when observing the early 20th century iteration of globalisation. In the absence of a single leader, geopolitics is back in town, rearing its head as the elder sister of macroeconomics (perhaps even as a domineering mother!). Poland’s post-1989 history is a perfect affirmation of that fact. The new geopolitical opening charted Poland’s path towards the Atlantic world of free strategic flows, market economy and by extension – opening up the market of a large nation residing in the North European Plain to penetration by foreign capital, technologies and brands. In return, Central and Eastern Europe was granted access to a global market system fundamentally different from the macroeconomic paradigm that had previously guided the Soviet bloc countries.
In the years of the peace dividend that took hold in the aftermath of the Cold War, quick economic development and the preeminence of the interconnected global market led many to believe that geography and distance had been rendered irrelevant, and that all goods and services are available on a 24/7 basis as long as they are commercially competitive. Those sharing this conviction seemed to forget that global exchange cannot function without transport infrastructure and strategic corridors, and that some regions are of greater importance than others. That translates into wealth, leverage and power of those who know how to operate in the world understanding the above overriding principles. Roads, railways, cables or sea lines of communication all traverse strictly defined territories. In the absence of one leader and one set of rules, any aspiring power that wishes to access markets or to project military or political power and secure interests would need to have both access and maneuverability within geopolitically pivotal spaces. In the past this generated geopolitical rivalry, which in turn gave rise to conflicts. With the likely further decomposition of the present international order, that rivalry will return. We are already witnessing first symptoms of that happening in places on the remote fringes of American power projection capability – in the South China Sea, in the Baltic Sea, in the Sea of Azov.
Generally speaking, any given nation is guided by two vectors, synergic in their nature and both serving the interests and power of the nation. Geostrategic imperatives directed outwards are: access to foreign markets, raw materials, resources, creating and maintaining supply chains for its economy, securing lines of communication with allies, and defending against political and military leveraging by foreign powers – which sometimes gives rise, especially in landlocked locations, to the need of creating buffer zones right behind national borders. That stems from the fact that neighboring powers are usually in a position to exert the most acute pressure, especially if there are no “natural” barriers between nations. This is precisely the case in the flat Northern European Plain stretching across from the endless swathes of Eurasia to sea-facing Western Europe on the main strategic axis of the Old Continent, north of the Alps and Carpathians.
The other vector driving the nation is directed inwards, and pertains to domestic policies. It includes creating synergy effects between resources and labour, with proper infrastructure build-up facilitating strategic flows. Coupled with capital investment, entrepreneurial spirit, resourcefulness and proper management of the fluid system of supply chain they form the healthy “blood circulation” of any nation. As such, strategic flows will always be literally a top national security priority for any nation.
There are few places as important within the entire Eurasia as that which Poland and her neighbors – Belarus and Ukraine – occupy. Hence it is of little surprise that the tale of Polish statehood is that of constant struggle for non-interference of neighboring continental powers, which have inevitably tried to subordinate this crossroad between Western and Eastern Europe and harness its potential to best serve their own strategic flows. Because of its pivotal geographic location, Poland’s strategic interests extend beyond its own borders, whatever they may be at a given moment in history. The fate of the country was always inextricably linked to thinking in terms of geopolitics. This way of thinking was imposed upon by requirements of survival in the borderland between the sea-faring European peninsula and continental Europe, more akin to the endless swathes of Eurasia and much different from the vibrant coastal regions of the Atlantic. Being located at the heart of Europe – on the Northern European Plain that forms a natural conduit between the world’s most prominent land powers of the recent past, driven by the desire to assure free access to the World Ocean via the Baltic ports, meant that whoever ruled the country faced pressure from not only powerful neighbors to its east and west, but virtually the heft of entire continents from both sides. For those external forces Poland was interesting as an interconnector. For Poland, the goal was to prevent her objectification. To this very day, there are people who remember armies – German, Soviet, Russian – marching across Poland, along the same east-west axis, and endless night trains with foreign powers’ war materials and soldiers crossing the Warsaw railroad bridges over the Vistula river, in either direction.
Vistula river (photo: Wikipedia)
Generation after generation of Poles pondered and grappled with this complex reality trying to come up with the best remedies. Żebrowski, Romer, Nałkowski, Wakar, Bączkowski, Matuszewski, Niezbrzycki, Studnicki, Bocheński, and Piskozub. Staszic, Kołłątaj, Mochnacki, Prądzyński, Mierosławski, Piłsudski, Dmowski, Sikorski, Żeligowski, Mieroszewski and Giedroyć and many, many others. Today, we follow their footsteps and grapple with the new geopolitical reality of the 21st century in trying to seek proper remedies, too.
The same is true of other nations of the Intermarium trying to make a living between the Baltic and Black Seas. Between the perennial industrial powerhouse of Germany, often in the past facing away from the maritime world dominated by the English-speaking peoples, embarking on the continental expansion towards the inside of Eurasian supercontinent. And between the Russians or Soviets – a land empire par excellence, locked in the merciless, relentless geography of northern Eurasia, eternally dreaming a dream of warm water ports somewhere at the coast of the World Ocean. Incidentally, this geopolitical constellation allowed the sea powers to play and use the Intermarium nations to drive a wedge between Russia and Germany.
At the same time, any past designs of the continental powers in Eurasia did not provide the nations of Intermarium with the much-desired access to the World Ocean and to its allies, thus depriving them of their independence. In this context it is easy to understand why Warsaw and other CEE capitals wanted to see the unipolar moment of post-1991 Pax Americana last forever. This desire also helps us better understand nowadays the motivation behind Polish investment in the LNG terminal in the coastal town of Świnoujście or the Baltic Pipe LNG pipeline, as well as the continuous efforts aimed at increasing US military footprint in Poland. It is also the rationale for encouraging the independence of countries to Poland’s east, that make for buffer states separating Poland from Russia.
The past 500 years, since the daring European sailors claimed the Atlantic, have proven that the essential locus of power, the place where strategic flows take place, is the World Ocean. The quip quoted at the very beginning of this essay serves well to portray the devout attitude of Americans towards their Navy, which is the real source of US power, presiding over the key regions of the world where strategic flows are generated and where they traverse. The mental map of ours is that of the Atlantic as a great enabler which offers the promise of wealth, social mobility and trade. It is a conveyor of sorts; of dreams and aspirations, of great fleets and great wealth that motion, colonies and trade generate. By linking all of the world’s seas, the World Ocean is the most accessible, the cheapest (both in terms of usage, and in that there is no need for infrastructure expenditure), and – if the global maritime hegemon so desires – a free highway of strategic flows.
Sea lines of communication became the main arteries of the global exchange, thus becoming the essence of connectivity. Around them – and thanks to them – businesses thrived, capital was accumulated, knowledge shared and absorbed, populations migrated, urban areas developed, industries rose. With all those, the finer things in life sprung up as well, from culture to fashion. It is no wonder then that the sea faring nations, having achieved a capital and technological advantage and having their own powerful navies, have usually ensured that freedom of navigation prevails. In times of peace, it provided a significant opportunity of economic expansion into desirable markets and the chance to make money from industrial production, and in times of war or tension, to project military power. This convenience was a trademark of the era of colonisation, and if one looks more closely, the entire 20th century, considering the fact that after the English-speaking nations of Great Britain and the United States had mastered air travel, they were quick to impose rules governing airspace very similar in nature to those of the maritime domain.
Singapore Strait, near Malacca (photo: Jacek Bartosiak)
Control over the World Ocean gave rise to a new division of labour: core areas aggregating the strategic flows around London, Rotterdam or New York were capital rich, had access to technology and controlled the technological cycles, while peripheries and semi-peripheries were commissioned to produce to provide products to core regions. This system is hierarchical by definition, and so the core can “juggle” peripheries, reallocating production if not at will, then at least with a degree of impunity. The ease with which production can be reallocated between peripheries is best exemplified by the Netherlands reallocating their grain production to the agrarian empire of the Old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, far away from the Atlantic in the early infancy period of globalisation. A more recent example is that of the US moving its labour-intensive production to China, allowing the costs of living to drop significantly, and in consequence easing the economic burden of the middle class. Generally speaking, this system has been characterised by a constant process of allocating capital within the economic chain of production towards low-cost labor and towards better returns on capital, higher yields, more enriching resources and faster opportunities. All in all, this was very convenient for the powers controlling the World Ocean as they had an effective tool set of coercive measures at their disposal (naval blockades, sanctions, and other friction mechanisms imposed on strategic flows) to discipline recalcitrants. The policies of the Donald Trump administration are hallmarks of this attitude, from Iran through Russia and China to Germany, as well as towards corporations that engage in operations undesirable from Washington’s standpoint.
The defining characteristic of core regions was indispensability; while one periphery could be replaced at the cost of another (there are plenty of examples of peripheral redundancies, from cotton to rubber), the core could not – for peripheries and semi-peripheries the opportunity to engage in trade with core regions was indispensable and a key element of any commercial activity. Mercantilist policies of the western powers were for long periods of history designed to protect domestic production and markets in their vulnerable development stage, whilst liberal policies were only pursued by rich and developed nations whose commercial and industrial sectors became well established and competitive.
Proliferation of rail as a means of transport in the 19th century allowed for the expansion and proliferation of strategic flows in continental Europe and the Eurasian heartland. In consequence, it enabled the rise of Germany and Russia in the 19th and early 20th centuries. In the 21st century, the very same principle means that China can pursue its Belt and Road Initiative. The current BRI project must be Mackinder’s worst nightmare, one that he admonished sea powers over a century ago, and one that the strategists of the Office of Net Assessment at the Pentagon must surely lose sleep over today. Today’s connectivity, made possible by modern highways, pipelines, high speed rail, and air travel (soon to be joined by the fifth generation of mobile broadband and quantum communication and – who knows – the hyperloop) could feasibly all be used in a coordinated fashion, creating a complex overland supply chain of mutually dependent markets in Eurasia. Those new technical remedies to the tyranny of distance and difficulty of traversing the Eurasian landmass by default increase the power of continental land powers relative to sea powers – unlike in the past 500 years. Once the new overland system has matured, whoever controls the World Ocean will no longer be able to claim control over the pivotal locations where strategic flows occur. To put this into perspective – the land-based leg of the BRI (sometimes referred to as the New Silk Route), meant to connect and bring together 55% of the world’s GDP, 70% of its population and 75% of its energy resources, is nothing but a geostrategic design at a massive scale, with China becoming the new core of this alternative world trading system of new connectivity. Just as in the past all roads led to Rome, in the future all the roads are to lead to Beijing.
We are now witnessing a moment in history where Mahan’s idée fixe of concentrating the US strategic focus on the World Ocean is being challenged by Haushofer’s and Mackinder’s theories that stressed the dormant potential of the Eurasian landmass, which may awaken if a feasible infrastructure is created that traverses the supercontinent, permitting the creation of economically feasible supply chains and strategic flows that remain outside of the World Ocean’s control. Rivalry over strategic chokepoints and critical supply chains will be the Clausewitzian centre of gravity of the competition in Eurasia. Let us not forget that in the past, such attempts, undertaken at the time by Germany, led to two world wars.
We are now entering a chaotic period of reshaping and restructuring global order. The post-Cold War order has now ended, but the contours of the forthcoming one are still largely vague at best. Will the rise of China transform into some sort of a multipolar affair, marking a return to tried and tested arrangements we know from virtually the entirety of recorded history – with empires balancing one another? Or will the new Pax Americana 2.0., reformed and reinforced once again reign victorious? Needless to say, this is what the Americans would badly want and this desire to retain the current status quo is shared by many.
Freedom of strategic flows we know from the past three decades have led to two phenomena: one, to the overall increase of prosperity, albeit distributed unequally – a fact that grew to be a cause for concern for some in the West. Two – to increased connectivity, leading to a greater interdependence. Interdependence and inequality do not necessarily pose a problem as long as there is one hegemon underpinning the stability of the system. The Americans, being the sea power that they are, the victor of two world wars and the Cold War, capable of projecting military force globally, controlling both the global banking system via the SWIFT system and global currency markets, presiding formally or informally over international institutions, achieved 30 years ago what had once seemed impossible. They created a global system which grew to be accepted by virtually everybody who wanted to prosper. Most importantly however, great power competition over the rules of the road of the global order was avoided. Japan and Germany, the two major powers defeated in World War Two, submitted themselves to a framework of cooperation created by Washington, and in doing so benefited from Pax Americana, using maritime transport and the relative stability of the international order to offload their export industrial capacity overseas. This system, therefore, proved to be a masterstroke of US strategic planning. China also sought to enrich itself, and therefore was willing to stomach US supremacy, while Russia, defeated and crippled by its intrinsically inefficient economic system, was plunged into chaos, and had little alternative than to accept US hegemony, while ordinary Russians were happy to get their taste of freedom and free travel, for the first time in over 70 years. This assessment was especially true of the Yeltsin era, when Russia sought to attract foreign investment and technology. Other Western countries supported US policy and offered unanimous support for Pax Americana, meaning that this period may be labeled more accurately not necessarily just as a unipolar moment, but rather a harmonious and well directed concert of the West in its zenith of power and status. All of that, all the power, affluence and prosperity, were derived on its rudimentary level from the connectivity of the World Ocean.
For the better part of the last 30 years, the interdependence that lay at the core of Pax Americana has not caused any great animosity or generated major structural tensions. When norms governing the system are called into question, this interdependence automatically becomes a vulnerability for the weaker party and a leverage for the stronger one. Power, in spite of all the idealistic proclamations of politicians, still governs and dictates the behaviours and actions of nations and major powers alike, much like gravity still governs physical objects. The very concepts of power and power relations lie at the core of politics. Power is, simply speaking, an ability to influence reality in a way desired. In the case of nations, power dictates whether a nation can achieve its goals – most importantly in the sphere of foreign policy, where failure to do so means it will become subjugated to the policies of others, dependent and subordinate to the needs of foreign powers. Violence and coercion manifest themselves when one power has enough of a leverage over the affairs of another to control and influence its actions even against its will. A real life example of such leveraging may present itself, should Russia be able to ship its natural gas without traversing Poland’s territory, while at the same time having a stranglehold over Poland’s natural gas supply.
Economic sanctions are also a form of leverage – especially if imposed by core powers of the given economic system. War is of course the ultimate leverage – and so nations are compelled to field armies to appeal – or to prevent others from appealing – to brute force.
When the rules of the road governing a system of which interdependence is a central part are called into question, actors within that system start seeking leverages to influence other actors, simply in order to affect their behavior. Then interdependence – such as control over supply chains, raw material resources or transport corridors, free access to which appear to be a certainty in a globalised world – becomes an asset and a means to influence the actions of other nations – a leverage. A zero-sum game kicks in. In the past this led the world to the brink of destruction – it will suffice to mention the Suez Crisis of 1956, which had its source in ensuring control of strategic flows by France and Great Britain; Cromwell’s Navigation Act of 1651 (aimed at destroying Dutch rivals to British maritime supremacy); US sanctions imposed on Imperial Japan, meant to deprive it of access to raw materials that triggered the Japanese decision to attack Pearl Harbor; conflict over the status of the Free City of Gdansk between Poland and Nazi Germany, or the latter’s 1939 demand to provide Germany with the “Polish Corridor”, which would link the exclave of East Prussia with the rest of the Third Reich.
(Photo: Michael Krämer )
With deepening rivalries, a tension arises between freedom of strategic flows and the attempts to limit this freedom. Free access and transit through global commercial routes, such as the World Ocean, air space or the internet, are then transformed from a global good into a licensed good that can be accessed only by “friends and allies”. Notably, any attempt to control and regulate the free access to strategic flows is likely to be considered by the developing non-Western nations as a plot in part of an orchestrated effort of the West to retain advantages acquired during the past era of colonial exploitation that secured their structural advantage.
Recently, a period of great power competition seems to have begun again in earnest, with China questioning America’s primacy in the international system, and the corresponding realisation in the US that Chinese actions may serve to undermine America’s ability to shape and define the international order. Control over strategic flows will be the epicentre of this struggle, testing both the will and the ability of successful powers to define the frameworks and conditions under which they take place. As Heiko Borchert points out in his piece titled “Flow Control Rewrites Globalization” this consists of four elements – firstly, it involves defining and enforcing the rules. Secondly, it concerns the ability to determine the availability of key strategic corridors where strategic flows traverse. Examples include straits, such as Hormuz, Suez, Malacca, Panama Canal), highways and railway lines but also seaports, airports and any other infrastructure hubs which are key to shaping the volumes and strategic directions of flows and transfers; thirdly, it concerns different technologies (steam power, the internal combustion engine, 5G); and finally it concerns various modes of transport – road cars, rail, plane, hyperloop.
As noted by Heiko Borchert, four distinct dynamics of rivalry over strategic flows will be discernable. The first will be the creation of spheres of influence with separate supply chains, controlled and channeled towards civilizational and economic centres which exert a gravitational pull on neighboring regions. Supply chains will then become lines of communication, very much like the logistical lines of strategic flows described by Jomini that either bolster or diminish strength on the battlefield. This translates to access to markets, critical infrastructure hubs and the transport corridors where flows accumulate. Those battlefields in the “competing connectivity” struggle will be Khorghos, Gwadar, Malakka, Hormuz, Singapore, the South China Sea, the highways of Pakistan, the railway lines of Central Asia, ferry platforms in the Caspian Sea, as well as Duisburg, Pireus, Rotterdam, Hamburg, but also connectivity hubs of Gdańsk and Małaszewicze in Poland. Rivalry over new enabling technologies which have the potential to affect or transform the nature of strategic flows will become another field of tense competition.
The second dynamic involves competition over rules and the ability to set norms applicable in the international system – effectively meaning preferential treatment of allies and those entities that choose to submit and synchronise their interests with those of regional core areas (this is how the German Empire attempted to build its Mitteleuropa construct). The third is the rivalry over narratives and dominant ideological currents – labelling and framing adversaries in a certain way, with an inevitable outcome of this dynamic being fierce protectionism. The fourth is the formation of alternative models of growth and prosperity – new social contracts – the danger here is unsettling the social stability and mobility of entire strata of societies.
Strategic flows, once believed to be free and unbridled will become polarized, and thus more chaotic, while business and commerce will find itself compelled to analyze and gain a deeper understanding of geopolitics. National champions will emerge in greater numbers than currently, eroding belief in Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” of the market.
Rivalry over technological standards – as is the case with 5G – will therefore be an epitome of power struggles between empires. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the German Empire led by Kaiser Wilhelm II attempted to break Britain’s stranglehold over radiotelegraphy by copying Marconi’s design and patenting it under a German name. Today, Beijing attempts to dominate the telecommunications sector by investing in 5G technology, quantum communications and developing an independent supply chain that would stretch across Eurasia, thereby creating a continental economy free of US interference. All this is part of competing connectivity strategy, designed specifically to do away with the power of the World Ocean.
The new era of power struggle over the world’s strategic flows has begun.
Autor
Jacek Bartosiak
CEO and Founder of Strategy&Future, author of bestselling books.
Strategy&Future
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