Tag: Geopolitics

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Unpacking the Global Pivot from AI Safety

The global pivot away from AI safety is now driving a lot of international AI policy. This shift is often attributed to the current U.S. administration and is reshaping how liberal democracies approach AI governance.

In a recent article on Lawfare, author Jakub Kraus argues there are deeper reasons behind this shift. Specifically, countries such as France had already begun reorienting toward innovation-friendly frameworks before the activities of the current American administration. The rapid emergence of ChatGPT also sparked a fear of missing out and a surge in AI optimism, while governments also confronted the perceived economic and military opportunities associated with AI technologies.

Kraus concludes his article by arguing that there may be some benefits of emphasizing opportunity over safety while, also, recognizing the risks of not building up effective international or domestic governance institutions.

However, if AI systems are not designed to be safe, transparent, accountable, privacy protective, or human rights affirming then there is a risk that people will lack trust in these systems based on the actual and potential harms of them being developed and deployed without sufficient regulatory safeguards. The result could be a birthing or fostering of a range of socially destructive harms and long-term hesitancy to take advantage of the potential benefits associated with emerging AI technologies.

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Implications for Canada of an Anti-Liberal Democratic USA

Any number of commentators have raised concerns over whether the USA could become an illiberal state and the knock on effects. A recent piece by Dr. Benjamin Goldsmith briefly discussed a few forms of such a reformed state apparatus, but more interestingly (to me) is his postulation of the potentially broader global effects:

  • The dominant ideology of great powers will be nationalism.  
  • International politics will resemble the realist vision of great powers balancing power, carving out spheres of influence.  
  • It will make sense for the illiberal great powers to cooperate in some way to thwart liberalism – a sort of new ‘Holy Alliance’ type system could emerge.  
  • The existing institutional infrastructure of international relations will move towards a state-centric bias, away from a human-rights, liberal bias.   
  • International economic interdependence, although curtailed since the days of high “globalisation,” will continue to play an important role in tempering great-power behaviour.  
  • Democracy will be under greater pressure globally, with no great power backing and perhaps active US encouragement of far-right illiberal parties in established and new democracies.  
  • Mass Politics and soft power will still matter, but the post-truth aspect of public opinion in foreign policy will be greater.  

For a middle state like Canada, this kind of transformation would fundamentally challenge how it has been able to operate for the past 80 years. This would follow from the effects of this international reordering and due to our proximity to a superpower state that has broadly adopted or accepted an anti-liberal democratic political culture.

Concerning the first, what does this international reordering mean for Canada when nationalism reigns supreme after decades of developing economic and cultural integrations with the USA? What might it mean to be under a ‘sphere of influence’ with an autocratic or illiberal country? How would Canada appease Americans who pushed our leaders to support other authoritarian governments, or else? Absent the same commitments (and resources) to advocate for democratic values and human rights (while recognizing America’s own missteps in those areas) what does it mean for Canada’s own potential foreign policy commitments? And in an era of rising adoptions of generative AI technologies that can be used to produce and spread illiberal or anti-democratic rhetoric, and without the USA to regulate such uses of these technologies, what does this mean for detecting truth and falsity in international discourse?

In aggregate, these are the sorts of questions that Canadians should be considering and is part of why our leaders are warning of the implications of the changing American political culture.

When it comes to our proximity to a growing anti-liberal democratic political cultural, we are already seeing some of those principles and rhetoric taking hold in Canada. As more of this language (and ideology) seeps into Canadian discourse there is a growing chance that Canada’s own democratic norms might be perverted with extended exposure and following American pressures to compel alterations in our democratic institutions.

The shifts in the USA were not entirely unexpected. And the implications have been previously theorized. An anti-liberal democratic political culture will not necessarily take hold amongstAmericans and their political institutions. But the implications and potential global effects of such a change are before us, today, and it’s important to carefully consider potential consequences. Middle states, such as Canada, that possess liberal democratic cultures must urgently prepare ways to plot through what may be a very chaotic and disturbing next few decades.

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CANZUK as a failure of middle power imagination

From Open Canada, we see why CANZUK is a failure of middle power imagination:

The answer for Haass (as it is for Judah) is leadership. But middle power leadership is not the same as great power leadership. Middle power leadership cannot trade in vague (if lofty) ambitions or general concepts. To be effective, middle powers must be focused, detail-orientated and technically proficient. This was the approach Canada used to lead on peacekeeping, organizing the Montreal Protocol on ozone-depleting chemicals, the Ottawa Convention on anti-personnel landmines and the Responsibly to Protect. All of these were clear-eyed, focused attempts to improve the international system. By leveraging their technical acumen and accumulated diplomatic capital, Canada and other middle powers got things done. These successes built international reputations and skills that could then be applied to parochial state interests. CANZUK’s supporters do not have this focus. Instead, facing complex problems, they offer vague gestures to shared liberal values.

This is probably the most direct explanation of why middle powers, as often considered amongst the Anglosphere, are routinely unable to actually achieve their goals or stated objectives. Dangerously, states and their foreign ministers may enter into arrangements in the hopes that doing so will re-create a past golden age only to realize, years later, that looking backwards has caused their respective nations to further fail to take hold of their individual and collective futures in the world stage.

While building alliances and tightening friendships can be helpful, they must be accompanied with clear and specific areas of policy coordination. Doing anything else will not enable middle powers to exert substantial power on the world stage.

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Russia, China, the USA and the Geopolitical and National Security Implications of Climate Change

Lustgarden, writing for the New York Times, has probably the best piece on the national security and geopolitical implications of climate change that I’ve recently come across. The assessment for the USA is not good:

… in the long term, agriculture presents perhaps the most significant illustration of how a warming world might erode America’s position. Right now the U.S. agricultural industry serves as a significant, if low-key, instrument of leverage in America’s own foreign affairs. The U.S. provides roughly a third of soy traded globally, nearly 40 percent of corn and 13 percent of wheat. By recent count, American staple crops are shipped to 174 countries, and democratic influence and power comes with them, all by design. And yet climate data analyzed for this project suggest that the U.S. farming industry is in danger. Crop yields from Texas north to Nebraska could fall by up to 90 percent by as soon as 2040 as the ideal growing region slips toward the Dakotas and the Canadian border. And unlike in Russia or Canada, that border hinders the U.S.’s ability to shift north along with the optimal conditions.

Now, the advantages faced by Canada might be eroded by a militant America, and those of Russia similarly threatened by a belligerent and desperate China (and desperate Southeast Asia more generally). Regardless, food and arable land are generally likely to determine which countries take the longest to most suffer from climate change. Though, in the end, it’s almost a forgone conclusion that we are all ultimately going to suffer horribly for the errors of our ways.