Empires of the Future

Instead of sea power, the next imperialists will depend on microchip power.

Techno-futurists commonly believe that a totally human-made future will advance individual liberty. Bruno Maçães is doubtful, arguing in World Builders: Technology and the New Geopolitics that the future will more likely see us living inside a metaverse crafted by one of the superpowers. He foresees AI delivering “a radical increase in the centrality of sovereign power” and believes the goal of today’s geopolitics is a hegemonic second genesis where all reside in an artificial cosmos that will be either American or Chinese.

This is not fairyland stuff, argues Maçães, for recent events show that the great powers are trying to scale up the smart city. In the imperialism of the future, a superpower aspires to be “a global system administrator.” A case where, as Maçães puts it, “your opponent is playing a video game. You are coding it.” This will be the consummation of the history of empire, for peoples will live so immersed in a state power metaverse that government and ordinary life are utterly fused: “the culmination of ideological power: a will disguised as thing.”

Maçães works for the consultancy firm Flint Global. A member of the European Council on Foreign Relations and one-time Secretary of State for European Affairs in Portugal, Maçães is the author of numerous highly regarded books on geopolitics. He is linguistically gifted—together with European languages, his research mines Russian and Chinese texts—and his books are characterized by a deft blending of philosophy and prediction. World Builders is sophisticated thinking, and time may prove Maçães right, but I wonder. There are four building blocks to his argument, and each can be queried.

A New Kind of Industrial Policy

World Builders opens with a quote from the Timaeus where Plato wonders about the model used by the builder of the cosmos. This philosophical topic sets the stage for Maçães’ inquiry into contemporary geopolitics where superpowers seek system control of a virtual world rather than miles of territory. “When your opponent is building a fully artificial or technological world that could eventually redefine your own reality, geopolitics becomes not merely existential but ontological.”

To create a new cosmos, microchips are basic. Microprocessing is the backbone of contemporary civilization. Banking, medical imaging and diagnostic tools, air travel, music and book creation, as well as security and weapons systems, all depend on microchips. Any power aspiring to global hegemony needs mastery of circuitry measured in nanometers. Maçães thus begins his argument by looking back to 2018 when the Trump administration identified microchips as a strategic security concern and sought ways to corner the market. Microchips require massive financial and human capital, and they are made in only a handful of countries. The security problem is evident once you learn that a single Javelin missile includes 200 microchips.

Trump’s actions were the first salvo in a “revolutionary process,” proposes Maçães, where the chief strategic insight was to see that “physical objects would be no more than `peripherals,’ hardware elements that collect sensor data and submit the collected data to the broader communications ecosystem.” Trump made the first move to take command of the building blocks of virtual worlds, but likely because China had signaled what was at stake in their manufacture.

You might not like living in a state metaverse, but it may well be our fate.

Maçães cites a 2016 speech by Xi Jinping where the Chinese leader spoke of Internet core technology as the greatest “vital gate” of the supply chain; to secure this digital gate, he continued, “We must concentrate the most powerful forces to act together, compose shock brigades and special forces to storm the passes.” Citing the famed Naval Academy professor, Alfred Thayer Mahan, Maçães comments that Xi’s speech is a clear recognition that “chips play a major role in the new geopolitics. If straits and islands are the gates to the oceans, microchips are the gates to the virtual.” Appreciating the stakes, Trump set a policy of decoupling in a strategic area whilst trade otherwise continued.

Someone skeptical that electronic relays will determine future history—and below I say more about grounds for skepticism—might observe that Donald Trump is proud of the number of Javelin missiles he gave to Ukraine. However, the British Daily Telegraph reports that Russia has more US Javelins than the Ukrainians. They picked them up from the battlefields during Ukrainian retreats. Exclusive access to microchip manufacturing does not foreordain who gets to launch the Javelin’s 200 microchips.

The next brick was laid in 2020 with the return of industrial policy and the remaking of geopolitics. Covid showed that states could force their populations into completely new living circumstances. Governments sniffed possibility: “If the way the economy works can be recreated to eliminate the risk of a viral infection, then it can presumably be recreated for the sake of other, equally desirable social goals.” Covid was a “conversion moment,” claims Maçães, showing that the social and economic order is a virtual world responsive to government will: “Big data and the Internet made it possible for the framework conditions of human life to change practically overnight.”

The deference shown to government during Covid was astonishing, but a skeptic is sure to point out that compliance was always patchy, carve-outs were legion, and resistance to isolation protocols grew with time. Furthermore, the experience of lockdowns upended some recent sureties. Pre-Covid, according to the “smart money,” it was a truism that American liberal arts colleges would only survive if they became digital and offered online teaching. Covid showed that students do not like online instruction, and the colleges that did best during lockdown were those that permitted students to stay on campus. As with the battlefields of Ukraine, the virtual has not taken hold of college campuses, despite the population being amongst the most “very online.”

Inside a System World

In 2022, the first flex of the new virtual system thinking was applied to war. The West’s response to the Russo-Ukrainian war assumed that geopolitical struggle is now not about “oceans or mountain passes but telecommunication networks.”

To weaken a geopolitical rival, the US sought to embroil Russia, “in a succession of system wars ranging from a new form of technological warfare to the uses and abuses of the global energy, financial and trade systems.” In Maçães’s telling, the Russo-Ukraine war is a subtle American proxy war. “In Ukraine the United States has played less the role of combatant than the role of playwright or even programmer … Washington is not waging war against Russia. It has moved the game one level up. It is transforming the environment within which Russia must wage its war against Ukraine.”

The US has tried to shape the battlefield by commanding the larger system of war. To illustrate, Maçães points to the oil price cap. Russia bankrolls the war by meeting the hunger of energy markets. The Biden administration sought to tie off that supply. “The price cap was only possible because the Western allies have access to the chokepoints of the global energy system.” In this case, the choke point was maritime insurance; an industry dominated by just a few Western firms. The idea was that tankers could only be insured to carry Russian crude if the oil would be sold below $60 per barrel. Maçães thinks this a “remarkably creative solution,” since it prevented shock to global markets whilst starving Russia’s war chest.

Strategically, the ploy traded on an “understanding of the global system as an artificially created construct that can be used to defeat an opponent without the need for a direct clash.” However, as Maçães himself notes, it did not work. Russia made use of “a growing fleet of tankers with shadowy ownership and vessels that turn off their transponders.” The skeptic wants Maçães to further acknowledge that this is a significant analytical concession. His story posits “a radical increase in the centrality of sovereign power,” but the failure of the oil cap points away from state power to the reality that in much of the world, there is little to no obedience to state power. This is a point stressed by Robert Kaplan: “grey market” actors operate largely unrestrained within and around nations and city states, and they hobbled this first effort at a virtual system control of war.

To a degree, Maçães admits the inconclusiveness of the example, but he is sure it was just a case of fledgling steps. The reason is that in 2024, there was no alternative to industrial and civilizational dematerialization. Climate change is forcing our hand, demanding “a radical separation, a final divorce … humanity can only hope to take control over its history if it creates a wholly artificial environment, a virtual planet or metaverse to replace the physical one.”

For a successful divorce, Maçães contends, we must transition to renewable energy, especially wind and solar. He thinks this could happen in ways comparable to our use of the Internet. Infrastructure in place, use of the Internet is free and unlimited. The same is true of renewables. Granted, the up-front cost is considerable, but after that, there are no restrictions. In support of this analogy, Maçães recalls a prior energy transition from sail to steam. “For the first time, military power could be detached from space and time, from geography.”

Unfortunately, Maçães does not return to Mahan at this point. Mahan argued that steam made American control of Hawaii strategic. If America controlled the islands, then Asian nations would have no hope to resupply their steamers, making an attack on the west coast of the US virtually impossible. Mahan’s broader point is that like steam-powered war, every strategic venture requires an infrastructure of firm land, building, repairing, managing, guarding, and so on. A strategy will not prevail otherwise.

An illustration of the difficulties is the Biden administration’s strategic effort to “turn the ruble into rubble.” This ran headlong into the background reality of clean energy. “Events in Ukraine were a critical test case for the general theory advanced in this book,” grants Maçães, and indicative of the new system thinking were “historic sanctions” “to devastate the Russian economy as punishment for the world to witness.” The reality is that the US never stopped buying uranium from Russia for its power plants. In 2023 alone, the US contributed $800M to the Russian war chest. In May 2024, the US Department of Energy website published a blog post acknowledging that more than a third of the US supply for its nuclear infrastructure comes from Russia, the website owning, “we recognize that a transition away from Russian-sourced fuel will not happen overnight.” Three years into the war, America’s clean energy infrastructure is still tethered to a geopolitical rival, and world building is on hold.

Lawful Nature

Insightful is Maçães’s observation: “There is something I would call a `technological order’ that is deeper and more fundamental than political and economic orders, albeit less visible and often taken for the way nature presents itself.” Yet, he acknowledges that “almost by definition, the fully artificial worlds described in this book are ontologically fragile.” This suggests the great divorce from nature is not only not possible, but that nature has herself something to say about our freedom from her.

I own to being skeptical about Maçães’s version of the future of empire, but I grant that the picture will look different depending on where you stand on a central philosophical point.

Maçães invokes Kant’s categorical imperative. “For Kant, as we know, the moral law is entirely emptied of content. Everything is allowed, provided it is coherent.” If you think human beings are detached from the Earth and able to impose their creative will, then world building on the scale imagined by Maçães will seem feasible. You might not like living in a state metaverse, but it may well be our fate.

Those attached to the older hylomorphic metaphysics of Aristotle, where reality is explained as a unity of matter and form, will be unpersuaded. Aquinas calls the human the “other animal.” Law is not thematized in World Builders, but in Aquinas rule of law is an ancestral inheritance. Right order is a sediment of natural law, a product of animal rationality with inescapable concerns for security, family, solidarity, and reverence. This philosophical anthropology is a roadblock to world building at scale, for geopolitics is then backward-looking, an analytical unpacking of our immersion in the abiding verities of land and sea that have, and will, make history.

 

 

Graham McAleer is lay member of the Judicial Ethics Committee of the State of Maryland and author most recently of Tolkien, Philosopher of War (CUA Press, 2024).

 

Source: https://lawliberty.org/book-review/empires-of-the-future/