BYTES AND BULLETS

On high-tech battlefields and the race to dominate them.

The year 2024 marked the highest number of international conflicts since 1946, and, with them, “the world appears headed toward greater fragmentation and a wider dispersion of power.” So writes Feldstein, senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace whose subject is war and the technology of war. American power, he observes, has declined in recent years, partly by isolationist design, partly because nations, such as China, are asserting themselves more forcefully on the international stage. This doesn’t necessarily mean, he adds, that China will overtake the United States as a global power. It does mean that the idea of America as the world’s sole superpower has to be revised to take into account regional powers, such as Brazil and South Africa, as well as larger players, like Russia. A notable rising example is Turkey, which has been increasingly influential in the Middle East (and has been quite public about arming Ukraine). In some ways, the major powers are becoming alike; President Trump’s intrusion in the private sector, Feldstein argues, “shares similarities with Beijing’s economic strategy.” But in other ways, the international scene is diversifying in unpredictable ways, with Iran a leader in drone technology, France and Saudi Arabia vying to win “AI sovereignty,” and old alliances crumbling. This volatility, and the way in which Trump has attempted to press the world into compliance, puts the world in ever more danger of war, the author says. And that war, or those many wars, are likely to be driven by advanced technology, which the nations of the world are scrambling both to develop and to withhold from other nations. One thing seems almost certain, by Feldstein’s account: Current American policies all but guarantee American failure, even as “the prospect of an international agreement limiting the uses of these dangerous technologies is vanishingly small.”

For policy wonks, but with scenarios that ought to frighten just about everyone.