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Se pencher sur l’histoire pour envisager les décisions de demain

Mars 2023

Antoine Bondaz, Paul Charon, Jacqueline Deal, Pierre Grosser, Eleanor Harvey, Stéphane Malsagne, Nadège Rolland

Comprendre l’histoire d’une nation nous permet d’identifier les facteurs et tendances pouvant façonner les relations futures. Alors que l’Asie devient le centre de gravité économique du monde et que la Chine se mue en acteur gagnant en puissance dans l’ordre mondial, il est important de comprendre les rôles que les nations vont ou souhaiteront jouer au cours des vingt à trente prochaines années, afin de pouvoir façonner l’avenir maintenant plutôt que de réagir plus tard.

Dans le cadre de son expérience entre 2021 et 2023, Se Pencher sur l’Histoire pour Envisager les Décisions de Demain, la fondation Andrew W. Marshall a soutenu des travaux sur la France et les États-Unis, et leurs relations respectives avec la Chine. Ni la France ni les États-Unis ne peuvent se permettre d’être court-termistes dans leur réflexion sur la compétition stratégique avec la Chine et le rôle de l’alliance transatlantique. Les rapports présentés dans cette série sont le fruit de l’exploration par une équipe française de l’histoire et des acteurs des relations franco-chinoises, de recherches approfondies d’une équipe américaine sur la guerre politique du Parti communiste chinois (PCC) contre les États-Unis et les leçons à la fois apprises et ignorées, ainsi que d’un rapport de synthèse fournissant des éclairages et une comparaison des deux perspectives.

Des éléments non conventionnels mais essentiels des rapports des équipes française et américaine sont les spéculations des auteurs concernant le rêve chinois et le cauchemar chinois. À quoi ressemblerait le succès de Pékin dans la mise en place de sa stratégie dans les prochaines décennies ? Comment le PCC pourrait-il échouer à accomplir son rêve chinois ? Ces incursions dans ce qui est plausible, et non ce qui est garanti, sont destinées à susciter le débat, de nouvelles idées, et par-dessus tout, davantage de questionnements.

Ce projet a été réalisé grâce à une bourse importante de la fondation Richard Lounsbery. La Fondation Andrew W. Marshall souligne les contributions significatives de Jacques Battistella, Gabe Scheinmann, Jason Aquino, Jack Clark, Jeremy Furchtgott, Lewis Libby, Peter Mattis, Andrew May, David Pappalardo, Fiona Quimbre, Iskander Rehman, et Eleanor Runde.

“A State in Disguise of a Merchant”: Multinational Tech Corporations and the Reconfiguration of the Balance of Power in Asia

 

Narrated by Patrick Kirchner

Winner of the Inaugural Andrew W. Marshall Paper Prize on Future Reconfigurations in Asia

When corporations were created four centuries ago, they fundamentally altered the relationship between the market and the state while also shifting geopolitical power. Technology corporations are creating a similar revolution in the contemporary age. As the world moves from industrial and postindustrial economies to digital ones, technology companies now touch practically every area of modern life. Politically and geopolitically, they are also changing how states interact with each other and achieve their strategic objectives. Technology corporations now play a central role in states’ relative power, and over the next two decades they will impact the balance of power in Asia. A country’s relative power may be intimately connected to native technology companies as they become essential to economic growth, defend infrastructure and businesses, participate in investigations and attributions of cyber events, and even engage in offensive cyber operations. This paper looks at those different areas, examines trends, and then posits a plausible future in which technology corporations may contribute to a reconfiguration of the balance of power in Asia by 2045.

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Andrew Marshall: Net Assessment as a Tool of Strategy

March 14, 2023

The Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies (RUSI)

“Foreign policy strategist Andrew Marshall had a career that spanned seven decades from the late 1940s. He was hailed by a former KGB officer as ‘the grey cardinal, the éminence grise’ of the U.S. revolution of military affairs, and as ‘the great hero’ of Chinese officers tracking developments in U.S. military technology, claiming they had translated every word he wrote. Dr. Thomas G. Mahnken joins ‘Talking Strategy’ to discuss his work and life.”

The AI “Revolution in Military Affairs”: What Would it Really Look Like?

December 21, 2022

Lawfare

“To some defense professionals and officials, the phrase “revolutions in military affairs” may seemingly belong in the 1990s, along with talk about how reconnaissance-strike and other high-tech capabilities would “lift the fog of war.” This understanding, however, reflects a misinterpretation of a concept that still holds significant analytical power for assessing defense applications of emerging technologies. The revolutions in military affairs (RMA) framework—a mental model evaluating technology’s effect on warfare—can be extremely helpful in addressing this distorted understanding, particularly for thinking through the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on national security. For example, and as I have described in a longer paper, the RMA framework can help policymakers consider AI’s influence on defense amid the U.S.-China technological and strategic competition by illustrating the current limitations of AI’s military impact and highlighting areas where technological and intellectual progress could one day spark revolutionary changes. It also highlights that AI’s military impact could be limited in the near term without critical and careful thinking about how the technology is applied.”

Cyber Power is a Key Element of Sea Power

December 2022

Proceedings, U.S. Naval Institute, Vol. 148/12/1,438

“China has embarked on a program to replace the liberal world order with a techno-authoritarian model dominated from Beijing. Central to this program is a desire to control the maritime commons. China is now a (in some measures perhaps the) leading sea power. It boasts the world’s largest navy, coast guard, and maritime paramilitary forces; a top-five merchant fleet; significant shipbuilding capacity; and growing control over a global network of maritime ports.”

 

Cyber Power is Essential to Sea Power

December 21, 2022

Proceedings Podcast, U.S. Naval Institute

Commander Robert “Jake” Bebber, U.S. Navy, and Andrew W. Marshall Scholar at the Hudson Institute, and Lieutenant Commander Tyson B. Meadors, U.S. Navy, discuss cyber defense as an essential part of competition.

CCP Weapons of Mass Persuasion

December 2022

The Andrew W. Marshall Foundation

The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP’s) approach to the United States today reflects the party’s formative competitive experiences a century ago. Starting in the 1920s, the CCP vied with the Nationalist Party (KMT) for control over China, but the CCP was also nominally allied with the KMT in the First United Front, 1924–27. In that context, the Communists waged political warfare against the KMT at the elite and the grassroots level. Initially, the CCP’s aim was to coopt the KMT. When cooption failed, the Communists turned to subversion before attacking the Nationalists kinetically. In recent decades, the CCP has used this united-front template against the United States, thanks partly to a foundation of U.S.-CCP cooperation laid during the Sino-Japanese War and reinforced in the late Cold War. This report accordingly traces the CCP’s repertoire for strategic competition to the Chinese Civil War (Part 1). It then analyzes the application of this toolkit to the United States across a series of interactions beginning in the late 1930s and continuing through the present (Part 2). The report concludes with two alternative visions of how the coming decades could unfold, hinging upon Washington’s ability to counter Beijing’s ongoing subversion campaign (Part 3).

This is an advance copy of a paper from the Andrew W. Marshall Foundation’s forthcoming set of publications
on Examining History to Explore the Future: France, the United States, and China. This project was made
possible by a generous grant from the Richard Lounsbery Foundation.

Jesse Ausubel on “Peak Human”

December 7, 2022

“Jesse Ausubel is the director of the Program for the Human Environment at Rockefeller University and the recent winner of the prestigious Nierenberg Prize. In his second appearance on the [Power Hungry] podcast (the first was on October 12, 2021), Ausubel talks about his new work on “peak human” and “peak humans,” why we appear to be reaching the limits of human potential, immunity to disease, “nature deficit disorder,” and why — after a lifetime of being a fan of the New York Yankees — he has quit watching sports.”