When Turkey shot down a Russian fighter jet in November 2015, the image of the falling plane went viral. Calls for revenge exploded across the Russian media and internet. Protesters hurled stones and eggs at the Turkish embassy in Moscow. And the high-profile host of Russia’s main political TV talk show compared the downing of the jet to the 1914 assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand that triggered the First World War. So how did Russia’s hawkish leader, Vladimir Putin, respond to the battle cries of his people?
He signed a decree halting fruit and vegetable imports from Turkey, banning charter flights and the sale of package holidays, and scrapping Russia’s visa-free regime with the country. His proxies warned about possible escalation involving energy imports, while the media speculated about cyber-attacks (Moscow had used this tool to powerful effect on Estonia in 2007, Georgia during the 2008 war, and then against Ukraine as it annexed Crimea in 2014). The most important battleground of this conflict will not be the air or ground but rather the interconnected infrastructure of the global economy: disrupting trade and investment, international law, the internet, transport links, and the movement of people. Welcome to the connectivity wars.
This form of warfare is not uniquely Russian – quite the contrary. As Putin signed his sanctions decree, the Turkish government was holding a summit on refugees with the European Union. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has realised that the inflow of refugees to Europe changes his power dynamic with the EU. Using his ability to control the flow of migrants as a weapon, Erdogan has gone from being a supplicant for membership of the EU club to being a power player who can extract money and political favours.
The EU is equally adept at instrumentalising economic interdependence for geopolitical ends. When Russia annexed Crimea, it did not send troops to defend Ukrainian territory. Instead it introduced an array of sanctions, including visa bans and asset freezes against targeted individuals, as well as commercial measures aimed at specific sectors of the Russian economy, such as the financing of energy exploration. The United Nations has also used sanctions for decades, and the United States has reshaped the very nature of financial warfare since it launched its War on Terror.
While sanctions are vastly preferable to conventional warfare in humanitarian terms, the ease with which countries are weaponising the structures of the international system raises dark omens for the current world order. In 1914, globalisation collapsed because the world’s most powerful nations went to war. A hundred years later, it is the reluctance of the great powers to engage in all-out war that could precipitate a new unravelling of the global economy.
Some may say that this is an exaggeration: sanctions have been with us since the time of the Peloponnesian wars, and mercantilist behaviour is as old as the state. What is so dangerous about the phenomenon?
The short answer is: hyper-connectivity. During the Cold War, the global economy mirrored the global order – only limited links existed across the Iron Curtain, and the embryonic internet was used only by the US government and universities. But with the collapse of the Soviet Union, a divided world living in the shadow of nuclear war gave way to a world of interconnection and interdependence. Some hailed the end of history. The world was largely united in pursuing the benefits of globalisation. There was talk of win-win development as Western multinationals made record profits and emerging economies boomed. Trading, investment, communications, and other links between states mushroomed. And these interstate links have been amplified further by the ties between people powered by technology: by 2020, 80 percent of the planet’s population will have smartphones with the processing power of yesterday’s supercomputers.[1] Almost all of humanity will be connected into a single network.
But, contrary to what many hoped and some believed, this burgeoning of connections between countries has not buried the tensions between them. The power struggles of the geopolitical era persist, but in a new form. In fact, the very things that connected the world are now being used as weapons – what brought us together – is now driving us apart. Stopping short of nuclear war, and not prepared to lose access to the spoils of globalisation, states are instead trying to weaponise the global system itself by utilising the disruption of various links and connections as a weapon. Mutually Assured Disruption is the new MAD.
Interdependence, once heralded as a barrier to conflict, has turned into a currency of power, as countries try to exploit the asymmetries in their relations. Many have understood that the trick is to make your competitors more dependent on you than you are on them – and then use that dependency to manipulate their behaviour.
Like when a marriage goes wrong, it is the innumerable links and dependencies that make any war of the roses effective – and painful. Many of the tools look familiar to those employed during the globalisation of the 1990s, but their purpose is different.
The global trading regime, once a tool of integration, has been riven by economic and financial sanctions. Likewise, global multilateral institutions are increasingly sidelined by a new generation of competing friendship clubs. Rather than using infrastructure and the construction of physical infrastructure links as a way to maximise profits, China and the US are using them as a tool for power projection. And even the internet is being used as a weapon, and fragmented because of concerns about privacy and security.
This means that countries that do not depend too much on any single other country (with a diversified economy; able to import energy from many places) will be shielded from most geo-economic attacks. Few countries will follow North Korea into a world of autarchy – but reacting to the exploitation of interdependences, they will try to carve out spheres of independence. The US is on a quest for energy independence; China is shifting towards domestic consumption, diversifying its foreign holdings away from the dollar and developing an alternative to the SWIFT payment system; Russia is building pipelines to Asia to lessen its dependence on European markets.
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