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(Daniel Estrada, Ethics@Newark, Human supremacy as posthuman risk. Journal of Sociotechnical Critique, 1(1), 1–40.

https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1013&context=sociotechnicalcritique)

Offshore balancing is yet another realist trope whose failure is seen in the inability to stem the rapidity of the Taliban advance once American forces left. Failures in counterterrorism from afar were seen before 9-11 where the U.S. failed to stem the rise of a Al Qaeda terror sanctuary. With the U.S. withdraw from Afghanistan, the country has lost an invaluable intelligence network and informants.

A more restrained U.S. foreign policy might be the recipe for the long-term survival of American power. “Offshore balancing” would at first glance serve as Washington’s guiding strategy: “Instead of policing the world, the United States would encourage other countries to take the lead in checking rising powers, intervening itself only when necessary,” as the political scientists John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt put it in Foreign Affairs in 2016. The problem with that approach, however, is that the world is so fluid and interconnected, with crises in one part of the globe migrating to other parts, that restraint may simply not be practical. Offshore balancing might be simply too restrictive and mechanical. Isolationism thrived in an age when ships were the only way to cross the Atlantic Ocean, and took days to do so. Presently, an avowed policy of restraint might only telegraph weakness and uncertainty.

The Red Sea is a vital economic artery and is likely to become more so in the coming decades. In geopolitical terms, it should increasingly be seen as worthy of unified policy attention on its own, perhaps more so than the traditional and broad “Middle East” focus of American and European policy-makers. More than 10 percent of global trade passes through the Red Sea each year, crossing two of the 10 most strategic waterways in the world, the Bad al-Mandab at the sea’s southern entrance and Egypt’s Suez Canal in the north.

The region comprising the Red Sea littoral nations along Africa’s northeastern coast and the Arabian Peninsula is poised for tremendous growth. The population is projected to rise from about 620 million to nearly 1.3 billion by the early 2050s, with a concomitant rise in GDP over the same period from $1.8 trillion to $6.1 trillion. But today the area’s African coast is largely underdeveloped, limited by a lack of infrastructure and large deepwater commercial ports. As the region’s potential becomes apparent, political, economic, and military interest in the Red Sea area is on the rise—and so are armed conflict and political instability.

Global retrenchment is fast emerging as the most coherent and ready-made alternative to the United States’ postwar strategy. Yet pursuing it would be a grave mistake. By dissolving U.S. alliances and ending the forward presence of U.S. forces, this strategy would destabilize the regional security orders in Europe and Asia. It would also increase the risk of nuclear proliferation, empower right-wing nationalists in Europe, and aggravate the threat of major-power conflict.

This is not to say that U.S. strategy should never change. The United States has regularly increased and decreased its presence around the world as threats have risen and ebbed. Even though Washington followed a strategy of containment throughout the Cold War, that took various forms, which meant the difference between war and peace in Vietnam, between an arms race and arms control, and between détente and an all-out attempt to defeat the Soviets. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the United States changed course again, expanding its alliances to include many countries that had previously been part of the Warsaw Pact.

Great power conflict is something that has more dire consequences now than it perhaps did in the 19th and 20th centuries. As such, the transition from being on top to perhaps once again. in a power competition with other nations is a coming reality fraught with uncertainty, especially in the foreign policy community. The result of the unipolar moment has been the U.S’s capitalization on being the unipole and subsequently the international system has been structured according to how we saw fit. Our foreign policy has also reflected the constraints and benefits of being the unipole for over two decades now. The U.S has almost in a way structured its ultimate grand strategy goals around maintaining this structure of unipolarity, despite that actually being out of any one state’s control.

Despite the surface level benefits that may be potentially reaped from the U.S’s status as the unipole, it is now increasingly predicted that a coming polarity shift is imminent in the form of a rising China. Since the early 80’s China’s GDP has risen at a rate of almost 10% per year following the series of economic reforms. As the country has continued to rival the U.S economic strength and even surpass it in 2014 in purchasing power according to data found from the IMF World Economic Outlook database, scholars are quick to note that this trend is one of the major ways in which neorealists tend to gauge power. In neorealist conceptions of what it

This aspect of hegemonic wars is alarmingly overlooked in the traditional theories around rising states and causes of war. However, it may have even more of a place in today’s era, where the extreme stratification of states due to the structure of unipolarity, causes inherent hierarchy for the international community. The U.S is undeniably at the top for better or for worse and due to its position, its high status is guaranteed. Yet unlike bipolarity or multipolarity, the incentives for states to compete for elevation of their status is somewhat moot. It is costly to challenge the superpower and thus the incentives for direct competition are especially weak. However, as U.S power continues to weaken and the international hierarchy becomes more ambiguous, this is where Wohforth argues great war could occur over positional competition. ““Dissatisfaction arises not from dominance itself but from a dominance that appears to rest on ambiguous foundations. Thus, status competition is unlikely in cases of clear hierarchies in which the relevant comparison out-groups for each actor are unambiguously dominant materially. Applied to international politics, this begins to suggest conditions conducive to status competition. For conflict to occur, one state must select another state as a relevant comparison that leaves it dissatisfied with its status; it must then choose an identity-maintenance strategy in response that brings it into conflict with another state that is also willing to fight for its position” (Wohlforth, 45).

Status competition and the need to fight over positional status in an unambiguous unipolar system for other states does not exist. However, what should be of great concern to policy makers should the U.S find itself slipping back towards a situation of bipolar competition with China is that observation from Wohlforth. As U.S power becomes less concrete and finds itself becoming similar to China in capabilities, the chance of China assessing the U.S as a comparatively similar state may occur. In turn China may begin looking to overtake it positionally due to an increased desire for status, such as the case of Sparta and Athens. The U.S of course would then be forced to perform the aforementioned identity-maintenance strategy Wohlforth mentions, seeing as it is coming from a place of high status for so long, and will be willing to fight China over something so seemingly artificial as position. This state psychology should not be underestimated, and especially as scholars make calls for the U.S to accept a return to multipolarity, it should be kept in mind the impact a return to these different systems will have on positional competition and status for states. The triggers for great power war will not be so removed as the once were under the current unipolarity.

U.S. forces would defend Taiwan if China invaded, President Joe Biden said Sunday, his clearest statement yet on the issue and one criticized by Beijing as a violation of longstanding U.S. policy.

In a “60 Minutes” interview broadcast on CBS, Biden was asked whether the U.S. would defend Taiwan against an attack from Beijing, which claims the self-ruling island democracy as its territory.

WASHINGTON (AP) — China is expanding its nuclear force and is on pace to nearly quadruple the number of warheads it has by 2035, rapidly closing its gap with the United States, the Pentagon said in a report released Tuesday.

The report builds on the military’s warning last year that China is expanding its nuclear force much faster than U.S. officials had predicted, highlighting a broad and accelerating buildup of military muscle designed to enable Beijing to match or surpass U.S. global power by mid-century.

Ross Babbage 23, nonresident senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington and the C.E.O. of Strategic Forum in Canberra, 2/27/23, “A War With China Would Be Unlike Anything Americans Faced Before”, , vw

A major war in the Indo-Pacific is probably more likely now than at any other time since World War II.

This is the real trap the United States should worry about regarding China today—the trap in which an aspiring superpower peaks and then refuses to bear the painful consequences of descent.

China’s rise is no mirage: Decades of growth have given Beijing the economic sinews of global power. Major investments in key technologies and communications infrastructure have yielded a strong position in the struggle for geoeconomic influence; China is using a multi-continent Belt and Road Initiative to bring other states into its orbit. Most alarming, think tank assessments and U.S. Defense Department reports show China’s increasingly formidable military now stands a real chance of winning a war against the United States in the Western Pacific.

Let us begin with power politics. We are entering a more multipolar world. To be sure, the United States is still the world’s leading power, according to nearly all objective measures, but China has risen to occupy a strong second-place position in military and economic might. Europe is an economic and regulatory superpower in its own right. A more aggressive Russia maintains the largest nuclear weapons stockpile on Earth. And major powers in the developing world—such as India, Indonesia, South Africa, and Brazil—are choosing a nonaligned path.

Realists argue that multipolar systems are unstable and prone to major wars of miscalculation. World War I is a classic example.

In directing a redistribution of US military and intelligence resources from counterterrorism missions to escalating strategic competition with China, US defense planners have made a risky assumption: that China intends to confront its adversaries through conventional military engagements. History, in fact, suggests a more complex reality—that America’s adversaries have identified US weaknesses in the irregular realm, and therefore intend to fight asymmetrically, in the so-called “grey zone” between outright war and peace. As the latest book by leading national security scholar Seth G. Jones theorizes, “While conventional warfare—clashes between large military forces—defined twentieth-century power, irregular warfare will increasingly define international politics in the coming decades.” In its eagerness to “pivot” from counterterrorism to great power competition, then, the US military establishment has overlooked many of the key advantages the former might bring to the latter.

Perhaps the most frequent criticism levied at America’s international counterterrorism missions concerns cost. For much of the so-called “forever war,” those concerns were valid and important, particularly considering that inevitably doomed regime change and democratization remained key aspects of the strategy. But they have grown outdated—by 2021, for example, the United States’ presence in Afghanistan was limited to just 3,000 troops who had assumed a far more limited counterterrorism mission and were suffering substantially fewer casualties. As terrorism expert Matthew Levitt has argued, and as eventually rang true in Afghanistan, “The few military deployments necessary to maintain an effective counterterrorism posture are the polar opposite of ‘endless wars’ in terms of size, cost, and risk, and should be pursued in support of international coalitions and local allies.” In fact, the badly botched Afghanistan withdrawal—and the violence and repression that has followed—provided perhaps the ultimate illustrative example of how and why counterterrorism remains so central to US national security and foreign policy.

China is determined to replace the U.S. as the dominant power in space. While proclaiming its peaceful intentions, Beijing’s doctrine considers space a military domain, and it is investing heavily in space infrastructure designed to secure both economic and military advantages. To ensure that it continues to compete from a position of strength, the U.S. must invest sufficient resources in preparing its new Space Force to defend America’s national interests and security in space.

Beijing’s rapidly improving capabilities are clear to see. On May 5, China successfully launched the Long March-5B rocket designed to eventually transport astronauts into space. This was the first successful launch of any Long March rocket this year after failed attempts to launch the Long March-3B in April and Long March-7A in March.

There is one reason why the two countries' space strategy competition will inevitably lead to a hegemony competition. This is because they try to conquer the space order. Conquering the space order is to define and establish the space order. Those who dominate space will dominate almost all sectors of the future world, including economy, technology, environment, cyberspace, transportation and energy. That's why the United States is considered as a hegemonic country on Earth today. The U.S. is recognized as a hegemonic country because it establishes and leads the economic, financial, trade, political, and diplomatic order.

There are two areas in the world today where international order has not been established. One is virtual space, which is the cyber world. The other is the space. Since the international order of these two areas is closely correlated with each other, it is likely that the establishment of the order in these two areas will be pursued simultaneously. This means that cyber order cannot be discussed without discussing satellite issues.

Intent on reversing America’s decline in the world’s production of cutting-edge semiconductors, the federal government has begun what is arguably the government’s largest foray into the private sector since World War II.

That’s just one piece of a larger, more muscular approach to industrial policy. It’s a road filled with hope but also pockmarked with risks. On balance, the record of government trying to improve the functioning of the private sector is poor, and particularly in complex sectors like semiconductors, the challenges are great.

All major U.S. defense systems and platforms rely on semiconductors for their performance. Consequently, the erosion of U.S. capabilities in microelectronics is a direct threat to the United States’ ability to defend itself and its allies. Moreover, the U.S. civilian economy is deeply dependent on semiconductor-based platforms for its daily operations. Ensuring U.S. leadership in semiconductor technology and securing the integrity of the value chains that design, manufacture, package, and distribute these chips are perhaps the preeminent economic and national security concerns of the modern era.

Of course, U.S. leaders have recognized the nexus between semiconductors and national security for decades. In the mid-1980s, President Reagan articulated the need to retain U.S. global leadership in chips to counter the Soviet bloc’s numerically superior military forces through “smart” systems driven by semiconductors—satellites, stealth aircraft, cruise missiles, and the like. Today, the United States faces an even greater challenge—it is confronted by a geopolitical rival that is stronger economically and technologically than the Soviet Union ever was. At the same time, the United States is struggling to halt and reverse the loss of its leading capabilities in manufacturing microelectronics. The recent shortage of automotive chips has driven home the damage that the steady erosion of capabilities in chip manufacturing can inflict on the U.S. civilian economy. It is equally important to appreciate the national defense implications of recent adverse trends.

Quantum researchers in China claim to have an algorithm capable of breaking public-key encryption, years before anyone expected. Accurate or not, the announcement serves as a reminder that surprising quantum breakthroughs are possible in the near term. If the Biden administration is serious about its designation of quantum information science (QIS) as a critical technology area for national security, it must do more to safeguard U.S. quantum superiority.

QIS uses the laws of quantum physics, which describes the properties of nature on a tiny scale, to advance the processing, analysis, and transmission of information. Quantum computing, quantum encryption, and quantum sensing constitute the three primary domains within QIS. Although it is an evolving field, QIS promises to transform almost any industry dependent on speed and processing power, from aerospace and automotive to finance and pharmaceuticals.

Matthew Kroenig 18, Associate Professor of Government and Foreign Service at Georgetown University, Deputy Director for Strategy in the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security at the Atlantic Council, 11/12/18, “Will disruptive technology cause nuclear war?”, https://thebulletin.org/2018/11/will-disruptive-technology-cause-nuclear-war/, vw

Recently, analysts have argued that emerging technologies with military applications may undermine nuclear stability (see here, here, and here), but the logic of these arguments is debatable and overlooks a more straightforward reason why new technology might cause nuclear conflict: by upending the existing balance of power among nuclear-armed states. This latter concern is more probable and dangerous and demands an immediate policy response.

One of the witnesses, Robert Lighthizer, who served as U.S. Trade Representative under former President Donald Trump, captured the tone of both hearings when he said, “It is not an exaggeration to say that the Chinese Communist Party has been waging an economic war against the United States for decades.” VOA asked the Chinese Embassy to reply to the allegations detailed in the hearings but did not receive a response. However, last week, when Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin was asked about G-7 countries' complaints about Chinese economic coercion, he turned the accusation back on the U.S, saying, "If any country should be criticized for economic coercion, it should be the United States. The U.S. has been overstretching the concept of national security, abusing export control and taking discriminatory and unfair measures against foreign companies. This seriously violates the principles of market economy and fair competition." A ‘naive bet’ In a hearing on Wednesday night, the Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) convened a hearing titled, “Leveling the Playing Field: How to Counter the CCP's Economic Aggression.” Rep. Mike Gallagher, the Republican who chairs the panel, began the hearing with a video that documented efforts by past U.S. administrations, both Republican and Democratic, to welcome the People’s Republic of China (PRC) into the global economic community, including granting it privileged trade status in the 1990s and early 2000s. “For the last 25 years, both parties largely made the same naive bet on China, that robust economic engagement would lead the Chinese Communist Party to political liberalization,” he said. “But Beijing saw our quintessentially American optimism as an opportunity to exploit and our treaties and international commitments as rules ‘for thee but not for me.’” “Well, now the error of wishful thinking is over,” he said. “The CCP’s economic warfare uses any and all available leverage to coerce us and our allies and it's time that we defend ourselves and the free world.” Fundamental questions The committee’s ranking Democrat, Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, was equally adamant about the need to challenge China on the global stage. “This is the fundamental question: Who will be the economic and innovation leader for the remainder of the 21st century? Will it be America, or the CCP?” Krishnamoorthi said. Stepping in to counter China’s various forms of economic influence in the world must be “pressing priorities” for the U.S., he said. “The moment to act is not in 10 years or five years or next year. It's now.” In addition to Lighthizer, the committee heard from Roger Robinson, former chairman of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission. In his testimony, Robinson claimed that U.S. investors are, in some cases unknowingly, subsidizing Chinese companies by participating in investment funds that contain Chinese corporate debt. Robinson argued that because Chinese firms are not subject to the same disclosure requirements as firms in the U.S. and other developed countries, they should not be allowed continued access to U.S. capital markets. A third witness, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, called for immediate action to bolster investment and innovation in key emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence, to keep the U.S. ahead of China in some areas and to catch up in others. “It’s never too late to stop digging our own grave,” he said. Rejecting economic coercion On Thursday morning, in a hearing before the Indo-Pacific Subcommittee of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Rep. Young Kim opened the hearing with a statement that was highly critical of China’s behavior towards its neighbors. For example, she accused Beijing of causing the recent crash in Sri Lanka’s economy by pressuring its leaders to take on excessive debt through its “Belt and Road” infrastructure-building initiative. She called on members to “recognize the immense economic pressure that the PRC puts on our allies, partners and friends around the world.” “The CCP uses debt-trap diplomacy through the Belt and Road Initiative to achieve its political goals abroad,” said the Republican lawmaker. “So much so that it is willing to crash economies and generate instability as it did in Sri Lanka.”