Our world is pulling apart at the seams. The former era of peace, prosperity, and multilateralism is over.
We have kinetic trench warfare on the Eastern Front of Europe and conflict in the Middle East, again. The impact and legitimacy of institutions like the United Nations, World Health Organization, International Court of Justice, and World Trade Organization are diminished. Technological and supply chain dependence is being openly exploited.
The questions of why this has happened and what led us here are important and will be a source of debate and discussion for decades, I’m sure. What is important today is the question of how we navigate towards a brighter future. One that protects the progress of the past 80 years, and strengthens the players who wish to build a future that continues the project of empowering humanity by making humans safer, healthier, better educated, and free and active participants of their own governance.
As leaders around the world have said, spanning from Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney to German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, those who still believe in and are committed to the values that have defended human dignity and advanced global flourishing must cement their bonds and invest in our shared resilience to ensure a more just future that can resist regressive forces.
While our prior 80 years of progress have seen many advancements and benefits to the democratic participants of the project, the most striking failure of the period has been a steady weakening of technological, economic, and military resilience in most of those nations. There has been a gradual loss of diversified dependence, ceded to a handful of massive technology conglomerates, and this has led to severe single-point-of-failure risks that threaten the national security of many of the largest democratic nations. In pursuit of maximal efficiency, we have been left with fragility. Strategic resilience is not free, but the cost of fragility is immense.
National sovereignty is a country’s foundation for self-determination and flourishing. Without it, a nation sits subject to the will of another in determining its future. It’s important to establish that sovereignty should not mean isolationism or decoupling, though it can easily be interpreted that way to devastating effect. Sovereignty should not run counter to multilateralism, and should instead feed into a strategy of multilateral cooperation that diversifies supply chains, decentralizes technological power, and ensures resilience and autonomy in the face of crises. It must do this without sacrificing prosperity, efficiency, and partnership in the way isolationism inevitably does.
At the same time as we’ve witnessed the end of our prior era of progress, AI has come to fruition. With it, we’ll witness the most substantial change in economic productive capacity in at least a century. Artificial Intelligence is now being integrated into every national core priority, from health, to energy, to defense, to education, to fundamental research and development. There is a great deal to be said about the potential impact of this change, both the good and the bad. For now, I will emphasise the significance of the change, and that much more than a country’s competitiveness is at stake. Sovereignty in AI will become fundamental to national sovereignty, and goes far beyond where datacenters are located. Sovereignty in AI will require technical guarantees about control, security, and operational autonomy. It is essential that those nations who rise to the task of guaranteeing a brighter future immediately pursue policies of diversification across both the public sector and critical industries that underpin their economies. It will take proactive and risk-tolerant investment in supply chain resilience to position our democracies to secure that future on their own terms.
While the period of tumult we’ve entered is disorientating, it presents a generational opportunity for establishing a deeper and more diverse array of global partnerships. This will over time create a much stronger global foundation for democratic values. We have seen and can learn from the weaknesses of the former status quo. Over the coming decades, I believe that nations committed to the values that have driven social and economic progress over the past 80 years will continue to lead on the global stage. To do so, we will need to collectively integrate our technologies, economies, and militaries. We will need to rapidly diversify who we buy technology from, and invest heavily in strengthening and developing sovereign capabilities. We will need to diversify the supply chain for critical industries by forging new partnerships across medicine, natural resources, energy, telecommunications, manufacturing, financial services and more. And we will need to immediately strengthen our ability to defend ourselves and project strength abroad.
A better future is ahead of us. If democratic nations rise to the occasion, on the other side of this process, we will see a more stable and lasting peace. We will see more robust and resilient democracies flourish. And we will see even more opportunity and prosperity than we’ve known these past 80 years. There is a bright future to be built by those who still believe.