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Abstract This analysis examines European diplomatic efforts to support Ukraine’s territorial integrity amid the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war, highlighting the EU’s evolving role as a security actor. The August 18, 2025, White House summit marked a key moment, with EU leaders pledging "ironclad" security guarantees modelled after NATO’s Article 5, without formal NATO membership for Ukraine, and proposing a "reassurance force" of European troops post-ceasefire. The EU commits to unrestricted Ukrainian military capabilities, sustained economic and military aid, and intensified sanctions against Russia. While the EU aims to bolster Ukraine’s self-defence and facilitate peace talks, challenges persist, including funding, coordination with the U.S., and Russia’s rejection of guarantees involving Western troops. The EU’s approach reflects a strategic shift toward a more assertive Common Foreign and Security Policy, though institutional limitations remain. The guarantees are intertwined with Ukraine’s EU accession ambitions, carrying significant geopolitical and financial implications for the European security architecture and regional stability.Key Words: Ukrainian War, European Security, EU, U.S., Russia Introduction The ongoing war in Ukraine likely marks the end of the post-Cold War security environment in Europe and the rest of the world. The old international system, based on the benign hegemony of the United States and its dominance in international institutions, is witnessing the vanishing of the pretence of the leading role of international law and international regimes before our eyes. What is emerging brings back memories of the 19th-century Concert of Europe, where the great powers of Europe— Austria, France, Prussia (later Germany), Russia, and the United Kingdom —came together to maintain the European balance of power, political boundaries, and spheres of influence. This time around, however, there are fewer players, and the gameboard is genuinely global. The U.S., China and Russia do not leave much space for other players, at least in the global context. The EU declares itself to be a global player, matching the influence of the big three, but in all honesty, it is not treated as such by them.  This analysis looks at the latest developments regarding the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine (a proxy war between NATO and Russia) and specifically at the role of the EU and its proposed security guarantees offered to Ukraine. The August 18 Meeting On August 18, 2025, a meeting took place at the White House. It included U.S. President Donald Trump, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and leaders from Germany, France, Italy, the UK, Finland, the European Commission, the European Council, and NATO. They talked about ways to stop Russia's invasion of Ukraine. A key topic was security guarantees for Ukraine. The EU promised strong protection for Ukraine's independence and borders. This is intended to prevent future Russian attacks, even though Ukraine is unlikely to join NATO soon. These promises build on earlier security agreements but demonstrate a more unified European effort, with the U.S. providing support but not leading with troops or NATO membership.  Ironclad Security Guarantees Equivalent to NATO's Article 5 (Collective Defence) The EU promised to give firm, long-term security promises to Ukraine, similar to NATO's Article 5. This means an attack on Ukraine would be seen as an attack on those who promised to help. However, these promises would not be part of NATO to avoid upsetting Russia or requiring all NATO members to agree. European leaders, including those from the "Coalition of the Willing," are prepared to deploy a "reassurance force" or peacekeepers to Ukraine once the fighting ceases. This force would comprise troops from different European countries, taking turns to monitor and enforce any peace agreement, with a primary focus on preventing new attacks. EU officials stated that Russia cannot halt these plans or Ukraine's future aspirations to join the EU and NATO. Trump said the U.S. will work with Europe and might provide air support, but will not send American ground troops, making Europe the "first line of defence." Meanwhile, the U.S. will support by selling weapons.[1]  No Restrictions on Ukraine's Military Capabilities   EU leaders want Ukraine's military to have no limits on size, type, or actions. This means Ukraine can make weapons at home and get more from Western countries without Russia stopping them. The aim is for Ukraine to have a strong army for many years. Europe will also increase its own military production to help. Ukraine plans to buy $90 billion in U.S. weapons, mostly paid for by Europe. This includes planes, air defence systems, and drones. A formal agreement is expected within 10 days of the meeting.[2]  Sustained Economic and Military Support, Including Sanctions The EU has pledged to continue providing Ukraine with military, financial, and humanitarian assistance until a lasting peace is achieved. They will also increase sanctions and economic actions against Russia to maintain pressure. Leaders say they will support Ukraine as long as the fighting continues, and they will not force Ukraine to give up any land. Only Ukraine can decide about its territory. Europe is prepared to undertake most of this effort and may allocate an additional €40 billion for weapons if necessary. They will work with the U.S. to get support from Trump.[3]  Facilitation of Further Talks and Peace Efforts EU leaders aim to facilitate a meeting between Trump, Zelenskyy, and Putin. They say any agreement must include Ukraine's views and protect Europe's safety. They are glad Trump is pushing for peace, but say a ceasefire is not needed for security promises. Moscow's complaints, like those about NATO forces, will not stop their plans. This shows Europe is united. Leaders like Ursula von der Leyen and António Costa have stated that there will be no official changes to borders, and they fully support Ukraine's membership in the EU.[4] There were concerns that Trump might pressure Ukraine to make concessions during his meeting with Putin on August 15, 2025, in Alaska. European leaders quickly organised a meeting at the White House to influence Trump. This was seen as a way to win him over. Russia does not want NATO or Western troops in Ukraine, seeing it as a threat. Some experts argue that there is a "security guarantee paradox": if the protection is too weak, it will not benefit Ukraine; if it is too strong, Russia may not agree to any deal.[5] EU officials are hopeful, but they face several challenges. These include securing funding (Europe will cover most costs), managing rotating forces, and ensuring the U.S. remains committed after Trump's term.[6] Recent Military and Diplomatic Developments The Russia-Ukraine war started in February 2022. In August 2025, fighting and diplomatic talks increased. Russian troops are moving forward in eastern Ukraine, especially in Donetsk, with many attacks. Ukraine is hitting Russian targets. U.S. President Donald Trump is leading peace talks after meeting Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska on August 15. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and European leaders are also involved. However, significant disagreements persist regarding land, security, and ceasefires. There is no quick solution yet. Russian Advances and Territorial Gains Russian forces have concentrated on Donetsk and taken more land. From July 8 to August 5, 2025, Russia gained 226 square miles, continuing its slow progress in the area.[7] By mid-August, Russia controls large parts of Donbas and continues to advance, even though Ukraine is fighting back.[8]   Source: https://www.russiamatters.org/news/russia-ukraine-war-report-card/russia-ukraine-war-report-card-aug-6-2025  On August 19, Russia launched its most significant attack of the month, using drones and missiles against Ukrainian targets, resulting in civilian casualties and infrastructure damage.[9] On August 18, there were similar long-range attacks. On August 19, Ukraine and Russia swapped the bodies of dead soldiers. Ukraine has increased attacks on Russian energy sites to cut off war funding.[10] After the Trump-Putin meeting in Alaska, Trump met with Zelenskyy and leaders from the EU and UK on August 18 to discuss peace. Trump seems to support giving some Ukrainian land, like parts of Donbas, to Russia for peace. He also suggests U.S. air support as a security promise. A U.S. envoy stated that there is progress: Putin has agreed to U.S. security guarantees for Ukraine and has relinquished some territory.[11] Plans for direct talks are being made. Putin suggested Moscow as the meeting place, but this has not been confirmed yet (as of August 20).[12] European leaders, including EU figures, seem to welcome these efforts but insist on continued sanctions against Russia and reject Budapest (Hungary) as a site due to past failed assurances.[13 ] In the meantime, Ukraine demands robust security guarantees (e.g., deterrence against future attacks) and $90 billion in aid.[14 ] Russia, however, rejects European guarantees, insists on territorial concessions, and maintains unchanged objectives. As of now, no ceasefire has been agreed upon; however, Russia claims to be open to one.[15 ] Where Does the EU Stand in General? EU leaders stress that a strong Ukraine is the best guarantee against Russia. According to the statement of 12 August, issued by the European Council and the Council of the European Union: “The European Union, in coordination with the U.S. and other like-minded partners, will continue to provide political, financial, economic, humanitarian, military and diplomatic support to Ukraine as Ukraine is exercising its inherent right of self-defence. It will also continue to uphold and impose restrictive measures against the Russian Federation. A Ukraine capable of defending itself effectively is an integral part of any future security guarantees. The European Union and its Member States are ready to further contribute to security guarantees based on their respective competences and capabilities, in line with international law, and in full respect of the security and defence policies of certain Member States, while taking into account the security and defence interests of all Member States. The European Union underlines the inherent right of Ukraine to choose its own destiny and will continue supporting Ukraine on its path towards EU membership”.[16]  According to EU top diplomat, Kaja Kallas (High Representative/Vice-President (2024-2029) responsible for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy),[17] the idea of letting Russia keep Ukrainian territories (proposal as signalled by Trump) was a "trap that Putin wants us [the EU] to walk into".[18] She stressed that Russia has offered no concessions and that credible security measures, such as bolstering Ukraine's military, are essential—though specifics on contributions remain up to individual member states. In a like-minded fashion, French President Emmanuel Macron rather hawkishly and not very diplomatically echoed this, describing Putin as a "predator, and an ogre at our [Europe] doorstep" and expressing "the greatest doubt" that he would be willing to work towards peace. In short, the foremost European leaders are still ready to challenge Russia. They enjoy peace at home while using Ukraine as a battleground. Their new ideas about Ukraine's safety and Europe's security are bold and raise concerns about possible problems. The “Devil Lies in Details” The European Union is part of the "Coalition of the Willing" due to its key members. According to Wikipedia, this group comprises 31 countries. They have promised to support Ukraine more strongly against Russia than the Ukraine Defence Contact Group. They are ready to join a peacekeeping force in Ukraine by sending troops or providing other forms of support.[19] The peacekeeping force is envisaged to be deployed only once Ukraine and Russia sign a "comprehensive ceasefire agreement" or "peace deal" to settle the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian War. The initiative, led by the United Kingdom and France, was announced by British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer on 2 March 2025, following the 2025 London Summit on Ukraine under the motto "securing our future".[20] The EU has been developing plans for Ukraine's security in the aftermath of the war. The primary goal is to stop future Russian attacks, short of offering NATO membership to Ukraine. Recent plans include military, diplomatic, and financial help, with the EU and U.S. working together. These plans are still changing due to ongoing talks, Russian objections, and questions about their enforcement. The focus is on helping Ukraine defend itself and providing additional support, including air and sea protection. The EU wants Ukraine to be able to defend itself. This is important for any promises they make. The EU and its member states are ready to provide assistance based on their capabilities. They will follow international law and their own defence rules.[21] This includes ongoing military aid but does not specify sending troops or creating new plans. In this context, European Council President Antonio Costa has called for faster work on "NATO-like" guarantees. These could be similar to Article 5, where an attack on Ukraine would lead to talks and actions from allies.[22] NATO and European leaders are discussing a new plan similar to "Article 5." This plan would prompt allies to discuss within 24 hours in the event of an attack. They would work together on responses, such as increasing military forces and providing aid for rebuilding. This idea is similar to agreements with countries like the UK and France, which focus on building strength and recognising borders.[23] EU accession for Ukraine could trigger the bloc's mutual defence clause, offering a "strong guarantee" in principle, although its practical enforcement is debated.[24] Air and sea security are important. A "sky shield" is planned to protect the air over western and central Ukraine, including Kyiv. European fighter jets, with possible U.S. support, will enforce this. The jets might be stationed in Poland or Romania. There will be rules for dealing with Russian actions, like missile attacks. In the Black Sea, measures will prevent Russian naval threats and keep shipping safe from ports like Odesa using intelligence and patrols.[25] Some countries, such as France and the UK, may deploy a small number of troops. These troops could help with training in cities like Kyiv or Lviv, or they might help secure ports and airbases.[26] Sending large numbers of troops is not feasible due to Ukraine's vast size and Russia's demands. Instead, the focus is on training, sharing information, managing supplies, and equipping Ukraine's military with weapons. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said that guarantees might be ready by August 29, 2025. These include U.S. assistance, valued at $90 billion, which includes weapons such as planes and air defences. Europeans will be the "first line of defence," with the U.S. helping in other ways. However, there are concerns: Russia wants to be part of the talks and does not want foreign troops. Some reports also question the coalition's strength and clarity, particularly in the absence of firm U.S. promises. Possible Broader Geopolitical Ramifications First, supporting Ukraine’s borders could strengthen the EU’s role in European security. This would indicate a shift towards a stronger EU foreign and security policy, as well as a more unified European defence system. However, the EU’s current tools, such as Article 42(7) TEU and PESCO, are not particularly robust. They have limitations in how they operate and face financial and organisational problems. This makes it challenging for the EU to establish itself as a strong security force without assistance from NATO and the U.S.[27] Second, the EU’s security guarantee to Ukraine is likely to intersect closely with NATO’s role, as the EU’s defence efforts currently complement but do not replace NATO’s collective defence framework. The EU remains dependent on NATO (especially the U.S.) for significant military capabilities, and the guarantee could deepen cooperation but also create institutional competition or overlap. The transatlantic alliance’s unity and the U.S. continued engagement are critical factors in the guarantee’s effectiveness.[28] Third, an EU guarantee of Ukraine’s security could also send a strong geopolitical signal to Russia, potentially deterring further aggression and affirming the EU’s commitment to the European security order. However, it may also escalate tensions with Russia, which views such guarantees as a threat to its sphere of influence.[29] This dynamic affects not only Ukraine but also other countries in the EU’s neighbourhood, such as Georgia, which is vulnerable to Russian pressure and exclusion from security arrangements.[30] Fourth, guaranteeing Ukraine’s security is linked to its EU accession ambitions. While Ukrainians see EU membership as essential recognition of their sovereignty and security, many Europeans view it as a component of a future negotiated settlement with Russia. The EU’s guarantee thus has implications for the pace and nature of enlargement, potentially affecting the EU’s cohesion and its relations with neighbouring countries.[31] Fifth, the EU’s security guarantees would likely entail substantial financial commitments, including military aid, reconstruction support financed through mechanisms such as the European Peace Facility (EPF), and the utilisation of frozen Russian assets. These financial undertakings have implications for EU budgetary policies, fiscal solidarity, and the development of a European defence industrial base, which is currently fragmented and underfunded. Conclusion The EU declares itself to be a global player and consequently engages as a broker in preparing peace talks with Russia. Moreover, it envisions itself as a guarantor of peace on the European continent and Ukrainian security, as well as its territorial integrity.  Two important questions, however, remained unanswered.  First, given the EU's engagement against Russia alongside Ukraine, as well as its most prominent member states' support for the Ukrainian war effort, one would be correct to question the intentions of at least some European political leaders. On one hand, the openly adversarial stance against Russia may produce some deterrence-like effects (although, in all honesty, it is difficult to prove). On the other hand, it definitely does prolong the conflict at the expense of Ukraine and its people.  Second, the following analysis will examine the extent to which the EU's guarantees for Ukraine are in reality. Political declarations and paper documents can convey a wide range of statements, including the most hawkish and resolute. The real test, however, always involves actual acting in the face of challenges and dangers. Will Europeans actually be ready to back their words with actions? Will they be able to perform at the required level militarily and economically? The 20th-century experience would suggest otherwise. References1  Roth, A., & Sauer, P. (2025, August 19). Trump rules out sending US troops to Ukraine as part of security guarantees. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/aug/19/european-leaders-ukraine-russia-trump 2  Magramo, K., Kent, L., Lister, T., Edwards, C., Chowdhury, M., Sangal, A., Hammond, E., & Liptak, K. (2025, August 18). Trump meets Zelensky and European leaders at White House. CNN. https://edition.cnn.com/politics/live-news/trump-ukraine-zelensky-russia-putin-08-18-25 3  Europe must shoulder ‘lion’s share’ of Ukraine’s security, Vance says. (2025, August 21). AlJazeera. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/8/21/europe-must-shoulder-lions-share-of-ukraines-security-vance-says 4  Mangan, D., Breuninger, K., Doherty, E., & Wilkie, C. (2025, August 18). Trump-Zelenskyy meeting paves the way for Ukraine security guarantees, trilateral talks with Putin. CNBC. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/18/trump-zelenskyy-ukraine-putin-live-updates.html 5  Rutland, P. (2025, August 22). The ‘security guarantee’ paradox: Too weak and it won’t protect Ukraine; too robust and Russia won’t accept it. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/the-security-guarantee-paradox-too-weak-and-it-wont-protect-ukraine-too-robust-and-russia-wont-accept-it-263518 6  Schwartz, F., Barigazzi, J., & Webber, E. (2025, August 13). Trump tells European leaders US could provide security guarantees for Ukraine. Politico. https://www.politico.com/news/2025/08/13/trump-european-leaders-security-ukraine-00508598 7  The Russia-Ukraine War Report Card, Aug. 6, 2025. (n.d.). Russia Matters. Retrieved August 21, 2025, from https://www.russiamatters.org/news/russia-ukraine-war-report-card/russia-ukraine-war-report-card-aug-6-2025 8  A timeline of territorial shifts during Russia’s war on Ukraine. (2025, August 18). PBS News. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/a-timeline-of-territorial-shifts-during-russias-war-on-ukraine 9  Ukraine hit by multiple Russian strikes amid US-led push for end to war. (2025, August 19). Aljazeera. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/8/19/ukraine-hit-by-multiple-russian-strikes-amid-us-led-push-for-end-to-war 10  Harvey, A., Mappes, G., Novikov, D., Sobieski, J., Young, J., Barros, G., Kagan, F. W., & Trotter, N. (2025, August 19). Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, August 19, 2025. Institute for the Study of War. https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-august-19-2025 11  Smolar, P. (2025, August 19). War in Ukraine: Diplomatic efforts intensify ahead of possible Zelensky-Putin meeting. Le Monde. https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2025/08/19/war-in-ukraine-diplomatic-efforts-intensify-ahead-of-possible-zelensky-putin-meeting_6744508_4.html 12  Magramo, K., Yeung, J., Lau, C., Kent, L., Edwards, C., Chowdhury, M., Powell, T. B., Sangal, A., & Hammond, E. (2025, August 20). August 19, 2025: White House says Putin-Zelensky meeting plans are ‘underway’ following Trump meetings. CNN. https://edition.cnn.com/world/live-news/trump-ukraine-russia-zelensky-putin-08-19-25 13  European Union Leaders’ Statement on Ukraine. (2025, August 12). European Council, Council of the European Union. https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/2025/08/12/statement-by-european-union-leaders-on-ukraine/ 14  Hatton, B., & Davies, K. M. (2025, August 19). Despite a flurry of meetings on Russia’s war in Ukraine, major obstacles to peace remain. AP. https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-war-trump-europe-next-steps-527983fab40e58208e9e18c943de696a 15  Westfall, S., & Ilyushina, M. (August 19). Here’s what Russia and Ukraine have demanded to end the war. The Washington Post. https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-war-trump-europe-next-steps-527983fab40e58208e9e18c943de696a 16  European Union Leaders’ Statement on Ukraine. (2025, August 12). European Council, Council of the European Union. https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/2025/08/12/statement-by-european-union-leaders-on-ukraine/ 17  See more at: https://commission.europa.eu/about/organisation/college-commissioners/kaja-kallas_en 18  Wilson, T., & Lau, S. (2025, August 22). Proposed Ukraine land concessions are Putin’s trap, EU’s top diplomat tells BBC. BBC. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cp8zdezm507o 19  Coalition of the willing (Russo-Ukrainian War). (n.d.). Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved August 22, 2025, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalition_of_the_willing_(Russo-Ukrainian_War) 20  Martin, D. (2025, March 2). Britain and France to lead ‘coalition of the willing’ to save Ukraine. The Telegraph. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2025/03/02/britain-france-lead-coalition-willing-save-ukraine/ 21  European Union Leaders’ Statement on Ukraine. (2025, August 12). European Council, Council of the European Union. https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/2025/08/12/statement-by-european-union-leaders-on-ukraine/ 22  Tidey, A. (2025, August 19). EU and allies must “accelerate” work on Ukraine’s NATO-like security guarantees, Costa says. Euronews. https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2025/08/19/eu-and-allies-must-accelerate-work-on-ukraines-nato-like-security-guarantees-costa-says 23  Webber, M. (2025, August 20). Ukraine war: what an ‘article 5-style’ security guarantee might look like. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/ukraine-war-what-an-article-5-style-security-guarantee-might-look-like-263475 24  Is EU accession a security guarantee for Ukraine? (2025, August 22). The New Union Post. https://newunionpost.eu/2025/08/21/ukraine-security-guarantee-eu-accession/ 25  Gardner, F. (2025, August 19). What security guarantees for Ukraine would actually mean. BBC. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2qr08l1yko 26  Harding, L. (2025, August 19). What security guarantees might Ukraine get in return for a peace deal? The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/aug/19/what-security-guarantees-might-ukraine-get-in-return-for-a-peace-deal 27  Genini, D. (2025). How the war in Ukraine has transformed the EU’s Common Foreign and Security Policy. Yearbook of European Law. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1093/yel/yeaf003 28  Genini, D. (2025). How the war in Ukraine has transformed the EU’s Common Foreign and Security Policy. Yearbook of European Law. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1093/yel/yeaf003 29  Beta, S., Hetherington, K., Contini, K., Zajda, M., Smyrnova, H., Bidnyi, I., Lipska, N., Bahno, M., Tsios, I., Lysenko, L., & Zimmerman, L. (2025, February 5). The Legal Basis for EU Security Guarantees for Ukraine. PILPG. https://www.publicinternationallawandpolicygroup.org/lawyering-justice-blog/2025/5/2/xebqjexqu8ccgsvbo2rmcv4w5an13q 30  Brotman, A. (2025, August 22). The Importance of Security Guarantees for Ukraine and Europe. Geopolitical Monitor. https://www.geopoliticalmonitor.com/the-importance-of-security-guarantees-for-ukraine-and-europe/ 31  Brotman, A. (2025, August 22). The Importance of Security Guarantees for Ukraine and Europe. Geopolitical Monitor. https://www.geopoliticalmonitor.com/the-importance-of-security-guarantees-for-ukraine-and-europe/  

Abstract This article examines that the shift in Israeli society and political economy from ethnic socialism to individualistic capitalism was accompanied by a shift from a strategic and collectivist liberal Zionism to a nonstrategic individualistic right-wing populism. It is a shift that made the State of Israel vulnerable to shock and crisis, and turned it “from a startup nation to a shutdown nation.” Unlike the crisis caused by the 1973 war, Israel lacks the tools to cope with the crisis of October 7 and embarks on a path of self-destruction.Keywordssettler colonialism, right-wing populism, Middle East economies 1. Introduction: Zionism’s Transition From Collectivist to Individualistic Settler Colonialism The State of Israel is a settler-colonial project (Robinson 2013), and as such has never been self-sufficient. Israel’s first prime minister David Ben-Gurion cultivated Israel’s alliance with Western imperialism as part of a strategy to keep the Israeli military supplied with modern weapons and trading partners. Meanwhile, some neighboring Arab states cultivated an alliance with the Soviet Union. The bane of colonial societies is always the same: arrogance, and in Israel’s arrogance the seeds of its downfall were planted. Israeli society, very much like the white population of apartheid South Africa, developed a culture on racist foundations, and the disdain of the Indigenous Palestinian population spread to a patronizing and racist attitude towards Israel’s non-white Jewish population (Mizrahim and black Jews; Ben-Eliezer 2007). The history of Israel’s political economy can be traced along the trajectory of this arrogant approach and the events that confirm, or undermine, Israel’s arrogance. I briefly mention two such seminal events before proceeding to the more contemporary developments. The first was the war of 1967, which has given rise to Israel’s messianic religious right wing, certain that God is on Israel’s side. Israel’s “miraculous” victory against three Arab armies in just six days, commemorated in Israel’s name for the war “The Six Day War,” confirmed every racist stereotype in Israel’s colonialist culture. Popular songs celebrating Israel’s victory hit the radios, and the project of building illegal settlements on occupied Palestinian land, deporting prominent Palestinian leaders, and using collective punishment, such as home demolitions, have put a strain on Israel’s alliance with the imperialist West. Israel’s military industry was transformed by these events. After France, Israel’s biggest arms supplier at the time, imposed a military embargo on Israel because of the occupation, a new school of thought emerged in Israel’s security elite, arguing that Israel does not need to rely on foreign suppliers and could potentially produce all of its weapons and ammunition locally. The victory also gave rise to what Israelis have later retroactively called “the Conception”—the arrogant belief that Arab states will never try to defeat Israel on the battlefield again—having been overwhelmed by Israel’s superiority. The second event worthy of note occurred just over six years later, the war of 1973, also known as the October War. On October 6, 1973, Syria and Egypt launched a surprise attack that shattered Israel’s “Conception.” Israeli forces suffered heavy casualties, lost battles, and were forced to withdraw until the United States intervened with large-scale arms shipments. Israel’s dependency on Western support became undeniable. Even though Israeli forces, with the help of US weapons, eventually pushed back the Syrian and Egyptian armies, Israel was bloodied and traumatized. Israeli economists referred to the following decade as the “lost decade”—in which public resources were diverted to the arms industry and a large section of the workforce was recruited for extended military service with the reserves. The generation who fought in the 1973 war became wary of the danger of colonial arrogance (Bar-Joseph 2003). It was the generation that called for moderation in politics, for strategic thinking. The self-sufficiency illusion was nixed. Instead, Israel worked hard to position itself within global politics as a “bastion” against communism (just like South Africa did), and after the fall of the Soviet Union as a bastion against Islamic terrorism. The Oslo Peace Process was supposed to be Israel’s alibi, a show of willingness to compromise over territory in exchange for Western political legitimacy and normalization with Arab neighbors. Instead of a self-sustaining economy, Israel developed its political economy as a niche economy, becoming the world capital of the homeland security sector, with hundreds of companies exporting Israel’s “security expertise” in the form of surveillance technology, culminating in the export of spyware (Loewenstein 2023: 207). 2. Rise of the Right-Wing Populism in Israel The liberal Zionist project to rationalize colonialism has gradually failed, because of arrogance. In his article in Hebrew “A factory for blind spots” Ran Heilbronn explained the collapse of Israel’s security “expertise” through the reliance on technology and the belief that reality exists in the data, rather than the data being a tool to describe reality (Heilbronn 2024). The Israeli security industry conceived of the occupation as a laboratory for developing tools of oppression and marketing them as “field-tested” (Loewenstein 2023: 49). It has failed to reflect that the identity of the self-appointed security experts as colonizers makes them predictable. This is especially the case in their tendency to repeatedly underestimate Palestinians, because respecting the ability of Palestinians to develop creative methods of resistance and outwit Israeli oppressive measures undermines the racist arrogance that is necessary to justify apartheid (Shlaim 2015: 133–180). The rise of the populist right wing in Israel can be explained through the intergenerational discourse among Jewish Israeli society. The generation that fought in the militias to expel the Indigenous Palestinian population and establish the State of Israel, as well as its children, were raised on the collectivist values and glorifying sacrifice (Feige 2002: v–xiv). As a popular 1948 song by Haim Gouri played on official state ceremonies states, “love consecrated in blood will blossom amongst us once again.” Subsequent generations, those born since 1967, the “euphoria” period (including the baby-boom generation after the 1973 war; Ozacky-Lazar 2018: 18–24) and their children, have been raised on the sense of entitlement to the spoils of war for which their parents and grandparents made great sacrifices. Calls for further expanding the borders, acquiring more land, and building more settlements, which were consistently made by the settler movement, have been perceived by the older elites as an ungrateful disrespect to their own sacrifices, and that Israel is at a risk of overextending itself and losing everything. This has become the main narrative of liberal Zionism (Ayyash 2023). The intergenerational shift from strategic, “rational” Zionism based on calculated sacrifice for the purpose of colonizing Palestine while maintaining both a Jewish majority and good relations with the West, toward a religious populist Zionism built on a sense of entitlement, dismissing threats and obstacles to the Zionist Project, is a shift dialectically inherent to the colonial process and inseparable from it (Sabbagh-Khoury 2022). Every colonial society has a “founders” generation that is honored for its commitment to the collective national project at great personal costs, which is followed by increasingly entitled generations who are born with privileges and do not feel the need to earn or defend them. The colonial mythology exaggerates the significance of the founders’ efforts who “gave their lives to ensure that this land will be ours for posterity.” The demand from younger generations to make efforts to secure the land and the privileges of the colonizers diminishes from the mythology and is therefore rejected. The younger generations simply expect to inherit their privileges (Veracini 2010: 40). The right-wing advocates of collectivist nationalism and sacrifice (following the path of Jabotinsky, who in his Iron Wall manifesto warned that Palestinians will never give up their struggle against colonial domination, and Zionism must engage in an eternal battle (Jabotinsky 1923), have all but disappeared, being replaced by the right-wing populists, led most prominently by Benjamin Netanyahu. The main attraction of the right-wing populism is the idea of impunity: Israel can have its cake and eat it too. Disregard international law and international pressure, underestimate the potential of Palestinian resistance, and not make any sacrifices (Shad 2015: 167–178). As the rate of conscription to the Israeli military plummeted since the 1990s (Arlosoroff 2019; Shalev 2004: 88–101), Israelis became accustomed to justifying military aggression against Palestinians from the comfort of their armchairs. While refusal to serve remains a marginal phenomenon, draft dodging had become the norm, rather than the exception (Perez 2018). Yagil Levy referred to this shift as a capital-intensive warfare, using technology and expensive weaponry to multiply the impact of a smaller number of soldiers, thereby also increasing the negotiating power of those soldiers who were able to make demands for material and nonmaterial rewards in exchange for their military service, which conscripts would normally not be able to make (Levy 2003: 222). The populist right wing conflates the State of Israel with the Jewish people, ignoring both the existence of non-Jewish Israelis and the existence of non-Israeli Jews. Instead of addressing criticism and planning strategic responses, populists use ad-hominem attacks to delegitimize criticism. Netanyahu dismisses critique against Israel’s apartheid and war crimes as “antisemitic” whether it’s the BDS movement (Boycott, Divestments, Sanctions; Black 2014), legal action from the International Court of Justice or from the International Criminal Court (Heller 2019), or even recognition of the State of Palestine (Landale 2024). Eventually this populist argument has become mainstream so that even opposition leaders from the liberal Zionist factions adopted it (TOI Staff 2022). The liberal Zionist forces found themselves at a disadvantage after the invasion of Lebanon in 2006, which was seen as a military failure, and was exploited by the far right to accuse the government of weakness (Erlanger 2006). The Israeli attack against Gaza just before the February 2009 elections claimed the lives of over 1,400 Palestinians, most of them civilians. The leader of the liberal-Zionist camp at the time, Tzipi Livni, served as minister of foreign affairs. Her position was (and remains) that the liberal Zionist camp is more strategic and has more tools to secure Jewish control over Palestine than the populist right wing (Livni 2018). This argument backfired because the populist right wing grew domestically stronger in the face of threats of international restrictions. The same process occurred in 2022 with the publication of four reports about Israeli apartheid (Abofoul 2022), leading to the collapse of the last liberal Zionist government, which could not come up with a strategy to defend Israel from the accusation of apartheid. Just like the brutal attack on Gaza in the winter of 2008, the government of liberal Zionist parties tried to demonstrate its brutality toward Palestinians accusing six Palestinian civil society organizations of terrorism without showing evidence (OHCHR 2022) and by granting impunity to the soldier who murdered Al-Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh on May 11, 2022, in the course of the military campaign in the Jenin refugee camp (Al Jazeera 2022). This tactic failed in the elections of November 2022 just as it failed in the February 2009 elections. In early 2023, with the most far-right government in Israel’s history embarking on the judicial overhaul project, the people who protested the government’s antiliberal policy were the very same who maintain and profit from Israel’s security sector (Goodfriend 2023). Protestors in Tel-Aviv have adopted the slogan of the BDS movement (Boycott, Divestments, Sanctions) “from startup nation to shutdown nation” and printed it on a huge banner that they carried through the streets (Ben-David 2023), warning that Israel’s economy will shut down because of the policies of the far-right government. The demonstrators holding the sign were likely unaware of the fact that the slogan was coined by BDS, which is another example of blind spots caused by an unsustainable colonial situation. The prediction was prophetic, but interestingly the very same people who argued that Israel’s military strength is directly connected to the economic strength of its security sector, who warned against the economic collapse, did not predict the simultaneous collapse of Israel’s military strength. The rise of right-wing populism in Israel is fueled by elements that are inherent to the Israeli case: the settler-colonial intergenerational conflict, the economic transformation of the social contract, and the shift in the military structure and the role of militarism in society. Nevertheless, a fourth factor cannot be ignored, which is the rise of the populist right wing in the whole world, with the polarization of politics after the dashed expectations following the nineties (Greven 2016). The model of the right-wing populist leader—racist, hedonist, and corrupt—was only known in two countries in the nineties: in Israel with Netanyahu’s first term and in Italy with Silvio Berlusconi, before becoming widespread in the rest of the world starting in 2016. 3. The Systemic Vulnerability A key difference between the crisis of the 1973 war, and the crisis that Israel is experiencing since October 7, 2023, is the change in the economic structure of Israel. In its first three and a half decades of existence, Israel had a corporatist economic structure (Shalev 1986: 362–386), in which the government, unions, and the private sector cooperated to bolster and maintain the apartheid economic system, until the neoliberal reforms of 1985 (Ben Basat 2002: 1–22). Israel’s federation of labor unions—the Histadrut—played a central role in keeping Palestinian workers from the occupied West Bank and Gaza as a cheap and exploited labor force both before and after the reforms (Hiltermann 1989: 83–91). The reforms, however, changed the social contract at the base of the settler-colonial state. From a nationalist project in which the privileges of the Jewish population are collectively protected and collectively enjoyed by the Jewish population at the expense of the Indigenous Palestinian population, the neoliberal reforms turned Israel into an individualistic society in which privileges are enjoyed individually and reproduced by market forces for profit (Shalev 1986). In parallel to the way that a neoliberal order restructures the social contract between state and citizen, it also restructures the contract between state and soldier. As Yagil Levy argues, the Israeli tech sector serves as a reward mechanism to attract recruits into prestigious units, such as the notorious unit 8200, for the prospect of future lucrative employment in the private sector. This “negotiation,” to borrow Levy’s term, creates a military vulnerability. The collapse of Israel’s tech sector impacts the motivation of soldiers to serve in Israel’s technological units (Levy 2012: 47). The capitalist structure is more vulnerable. In the absence of a strong social safety net, individuals are expected to make their own risk assessment (Swirski et al. 2020: 5). Modern finances are a system of management expectation. Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler have shown that the depths of crisis in capital can be measured in a time perspective. Cyclical crisis is marked by short-term expectations coupled with a long-term expectation for recovery. Investors attempt to build predictive models based on their assessment of future developments. In a systemic crisis, however—what Kliman, Bichler, and Nitzan call “systemic fear”—the predictive models are built on historical data, and investors are making fewer references to the future (Kliman et al. 2011: 61–118). One of the first voices to herald that the State of Israel has reached a dead-end was Marwan Bishara, who focused on the aspect of Israel’s regional integration into the Middle East, which remains an essential strategic element in Israel’s sustainable existence, but which could not continue after Israel embarked on the onslaught against the Gaza Strip, intentionally targeting civilians (Bishara 2023). The oppressive structure of the State of Israel is vulnerable to the external pressure that is applied by Palestinian resistance, which takes the form of both armed and unarmed resistance. The armed resistance is much less relevant to the discussion here, because the capitalist vulnerability is suspended in times of “security crisis,” framed as a temporary time in which collective mobilization and sacrifice are necessary. The unarmed forms of Palestinian resistance such as BDS expose the vulnerability of Israel’s apartheid and challenge the sustainability of the oppressive structures (Awad 1984). The slogan “they oppress, we BDS” leaves Israelis with no choice but to consider whether the same methods used to crush the Palestinian resistance are in the end self-defeating (Barghouti 2020). Palestinian resistance has developed through stages, searching for means to overcome Israeli oppression. Collective leadership replaced individualistic leadership in order to survive assassinations (Baylouny 2009). Intersectional and progressive alliance building proved effective in creating solidarity in the heart of Israel’s Western support bases, especially North America and Western Europe (Salih et al. 2020). While liberal Zionism excelled in infiltrating Palestinian society and sabotaging its resistance (Cohen 2009), the populist right adopts the dehumanization of Palestinians as a fact, rather than a tool, and is therefore unable to infiltrate Palestinian society effectively. As Major General Amos Gilad said in 2011 “we don’t do Gandhi very well” (Dana 2011)—Palestinians found the weak point in Israel’s oppressive regime. Israel’s closest allies begin to contemplate the unthinkable—the end of the Zionist state. For Germany, whose unconditional support for Israel turned into a quasi-state religion due to an intentional conflation of Judaism and the State of Israel (Moses 2021), the notion that the State of Israel will cease to exist is more controversial than the speculations about the imminent demise of the GDR (German Democratic Republic, which was dismantled in 1990). Nevertheless, even German mainstream media cannot silence the shutdown nation voices when they come from Israeli Jews or former Israeli Jews (Tschemerinsky 2024). Two prominent Israeli economists, Eugene Kandel and Ron Tzur, wrote a scathing report in which they come to the conclusion that Israel will not survive to its 100th year and kept the document a secret, worried that it could become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Faced with lack of interest from the government, however, they gave interviews about the report (Arlosoroff 2024). Israeli billionaire Gil Schwed compared Israel to Afghanistan—a state that collapsed under an Indigenous insurgency and abandoned by its US ally, and which does not attract foreign investments (Cohen 2024). The Haaretz newspaper published its editorial on Israel’s Independence Day with the headline that Israel will not survive to celebrate its 100th Independence Day. In the English version of the newspaper, the headline was qualified with the extra text “unless we are rid of Netanyahu” (Haaretz 2024). The expected delayed collapse is meaningless in a capitalist economy. Investors who believe that the State of Israel is a time bomb with a twenty-year timer will not buy Israeli bonds, nor invest in the economy. Parents will not want to raise children into (what they perceive as) an inevitable catastrophe and will exhaust all available options for leaving with their family (Silverstein 2024). Three Israeli historians have also addressed the events of October 7 and their aftermath as the end of the Zionist projects. Moshe Zimmermann, a Zionist scholar of German history and German-Israeli relations, commented in an extended interview that the Zionist project set up to create a secure haven for Jews, but that the State of Israel, the result of the Zionist project, has failed to protect its Jewish citizens on October 7, to take responsibility for the failure, or to develop a strategy to create more security in the future (Aderet 2023). From the opposite perspective, Ilan Pappe, an anti-Zionist scholar of the history of Palestine, published an essay listing six indicators to the demise of the Zionist project (Pappé 2024). Although the State of Israel does not by definition share the same fate of the Zionist project, and can conceivably exist without a Zionist government, Israeli institutions have, nevertheless, in the moment of crisis after October 7, published statements attesting to the centrality of Zionism to Israel’s existence as a state. The strongest example of these statements is the letter written by the Hebrew University to Knesset member Saran Haskel justifying the suspension of Prof. Nadera Shalhouv Kevorkian over her criticism against Zionism, by stressing that the Hebrew University is a Zionist institution (rather than an academic institution in which a plurality of opinions is encouraged) (Odeh 2024). Such unanimous agreement among Zionists and anti-Zionists about the fate of the Zionist project and its significance to the future of the State of Israel is an unprecedented consensus. Six months into the war, a third Israeli historian, Yuval Noah Harari, wrote that Israel is entering an unsustainable phase of global isolation and military defeat, and that only a quick ceasefire and structural change of policy (i.e., a break from Zionism) could save the State of Israel from demise (Noah-Harari 2024). 4. Conclusion It is this vulnerability, a society built on individualism and privilege, which made the October 7 attack a much bigger trauma for Israelis than other disasters that claimed the lives of hundreds, or even thousands, such as the 1973 war. The Israeli discourse cannot imagine a scenario in which the State of Israel and the Zionist project will recover from the crisis. Despite obsessive discussions about recovery (Bachar 2024), the need for national unity (Shwartz 2024), waging war until the “total victory” (Tharoor 2024)—the public discourse is full of Cassandrian predictions of doom—and every failure of the public institutions, whether in education, housing, electricity production, or health care, is seen as the tip of a much bigger iceberg (Motsky 2024). A state, its political economy, and its political culture require more than just institutions de jure to function. It requires a collective belief in a sustainable political project with a perspective into the future. The future of the people living in historical Palestine, between the river and the sea, whether Palestinians or Israelis, is very uncertain, but one thing seems almost certain—the current political system will not stay in place for long—and the process of its collapse carries a tremendous economic significance. It is too early to say how exactly the political changes effect the economic changes. The threat of economic crisis is tremendous, just as economic efforts are needed to recover from the war, rebuild the Gaza Strip, and treat the physical and mental injuries suffered. It can lead to default on the debt, hyperinflation, and pauperization of thousands. But the potential for ending Palestine’s isolation in the Middle East and opening trade, the resources diverted from security and the military to civilian purposes, and a recovery of the tourism sector can paint a positive scenario as well. Liberal Zionism developed an effective, albeit highly immoral, strategy of settler colonialism. It cultivated a strong Jewish collective around a myth of individual sacrifices for the sake of the nation. This strategy contributed to Israel’s ability in its first decades to expand its territory through illegal occupations while maintaining good relations with the West. But in the long run, it contained the dialectic seeds of its own destruction. Younger generations were taught to accept the achievements of liberal Zionism as permanent, so why should they sacrifice anything? For decades, liberal Zionists warned that the populist right wing undermines the foundations of the Zionist project itself. But even though these warnings were accurate, liberal Zionists failed to acknowledge how the system of Jewish supremacy and apartheid that they have established eventually and unavoidably led to the takeover of the Zionist project by an entitled and unstrategic generation. An important caveat must accompany this article. The weakness of Israeli institutions is in their ability and their willingness to perceive reality. All three historians quoted here for their texts about the imminent end of the Zionist project share a common blind spot: they do not acknowledge the role of the Palestinian resistance in bringing down the Zionist project, and speak in terms of tragedy (the tragic hero bears responsibility for his own downfall). The caveat here is that I too, the author, may not necessarily be in a better position to perceive reality. 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Abstract This article analyzes the challenges and threats to global peace and stability, derived from the unipolar geopolitical vision of the United States and the application of the so-called “Donroe Doctrine”, promoted during the Trump administration and characterized by the “Maximum Pressure” strategy promoted by the America First Policy Institute. Through a methodology of documentary review of primary and secondary sources, together with a prospective analysis of risk trends, the strategic and leading role of CELAC in the defense of the interests of Latin America and the Caribbean is dimensioned, highlighting how this organization opens opportunities to strengthen trade relations with Asia and Africa, contributing to the construction of a multipolar world order by promoting initiatives such as China's Belt and Road as an alternative mechanism to the global economic war of the United States and its “US-CUM” project, framed in its foreign policy based on national security interests. Introduction 21st-century geopolitics has undoubtedly been characterized by strong pragmatism in the exercise of states’ foreign policy, balancing between two visions — specifically between the Unipolar Geopolitical Vision and the Multipolar Geopolitical Vision — which have categorized the praxis of international relations of the so-called Global North and Global South, respectively; a context that clearly shows a fervent struggle for political control of resources and for hegemony, where the United States competes for global supremacy with emerging poles of power such as Russia and China. Given the current international scenario, it becomes increasingly imperative to identify and understand both the needs and the challenges for the planet’s sustainable development, from a global perspective in all areas (economic, political, social, geographic, cultural, environmental, and military). In this regard, the present research prospectively analyzes the administration of President Donald Trump as part of the multidimensional threats that the U.S. represents not only for Latin America and the Caribbean but also for Africa and Asia, considering the impact of current U.S. foreign policy both on the American continent and for Africa and Asia. All of this is with a view to highlighting, through debate, the importance of rethinking CELAC as an international organization that systematically advances in a transition process from “Community” to “Confederation,” as an intergovernmental entity with the capacity to confront the threats of a unipolar geopolitical vision foreign policy, and in line with the goals established as development projects under the so-called “CELAC 360 Vision” [1], aligned with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the 2030 Agenda, adopted by the United Nations (UN). Regarding the referred geopolitical transition, it is worth noting, as Guendel (2024) states: “The rising multipolarity will provoke, starting from this first decade of the 21st century, the emergence of historical events that mark the reaction to the expansion of Western geopolitical power to those old regions that were under another geopolitical influence. Among the most notable events, we must consider the processes of de-dollarization of the world economy, the war in Ukraine, the tension in the Taiwan Strait, and, of course, the war in Palestine. Under this reference, it is possible to characterize the current international geopolitical scenario as a moment of transition between the previous form of unipolar power and the new multipolar relations (123) [2]. Building on the above, the current geopolitical transition is a systemic process sustained by the multipolarity of international relations, driven by the struggle for power and the quest for economic dominance in both domestic and international markets. This has given rise to a growing trend in states’ foreign policy toward the construction of a multipolar world, where territorial governance over strategic resources forms part of the necessary geopolitical counterweight in regional dialogue, cooperation, and integration to face the challenges of the present century. The changes in the world order require Latin America and the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia to promote an idea of continental unity, framed within an anti-imperialist mindset, allowing progress toward Latin American, African, and Asian continentalism, compatible with the multipolar geopolitical vision, under the sustainable development approach put forward through the BRICS. Regarding this last international actor, Guendel (2024) notes: “In the development of a new phase of the globalization process after the end of the Cold War — what was geopolitically a new scenario for consolidating unipolar power relations — new lateral actors emerged, the so-called BRICS, which, by proposing alternative ways of thinking and economic relations favorable to Third World countries, would foster the emergence of a new global geopolitical scenario of multipolar relations (123). According to this scenario, the trend toward multipolarity in international relations —strengthened by globalization and technological advancements — will allow for the consolidation of a multipolar world, though not without first becoming a causal factor of various conflicts and challenges on a global scale, specifically in all spheres of power (economic, political, social, geographic, cultural, environmental, and military). Hence the importance of formulating a strategy for regional integration of Latin America, Asia, and Africa that aligns with global sustainable development plans — such as China’s Belt and Road Initiative — which, combined with the BRICS, constitute two fundamental pillars in strengthening the multipolar world. However, this will also accentuate the differences in geopolitical interests between the strategic agenda of the Global North (led by the U.S. through the G7) and that of the Global South (BRICS countries) regarding the projected economic growth of each. Having this in mind, the present research aims to analyze the challenges and threats to global peace and stability as a consequence of the U.S. unipolar geopolitical vision and the application of the so-called “Donroe Doctrine,” promoted by President Donald Trump and the policies advanced by his main think tank, the America First Policy Institute (AFPI), characterized by the “Maximum Pressure.” Development U.S.: Foreign policy oriented toward a new global fundamentalism The new White House administration, under the presidency of Donald Trump, challenges the so-called conservative Establishment [3] in the U.S., and according to Myriam Corte (2018), in her article on “Analysis of the U.S. ‘Establishment’” [4], the following statement is mentioned: “The residence of the current president is the site that houses political power, but at the same time reflects migratory power, since it is a construction built in the 18th century by African slaves, based on Irish architecture. As for the cabinet, it is made up of wealthy white men, who are responsible for administering power, but in the current administration some members have been accused of domestic abuse and misogynistic practices; therefore, it is important to identify whether Trump represents that old, conservative, and rigid establishment, or if there is any change” (1). According to what has been stated, there is undoubtedly a perception of a different stance associated with the “Deep State” Establishment in the U.S., with relevant structural changes that have a strong impact on both domestic and foreign policy. An example of this, according to Myriam Corte (2018), is represented in the very fact that: “Another variant is the Bible study group that was formed in the White House, as well as the group of fellows made up of 147 young people between the ages of 21 and 29, with a characteristic profile: all are wealthy individuals, among them the son of the president of the World Bank, who represent the new generation that will inherit power…” (1). In this context, the U.S.’s status as a major power revolves around a scenario of geopolitical conflict, even prioritizing its national interests over those of its main strategic allies, as a consequence of the systemic deterioration of its hegemony vis-à-vis Russia and China. This has generated hostile political actions as strategies to justify its territorial ambitions, in an attempt to counter the exponential growth of the BRIC and the crisis this represents for the global dollar system. A clear example of some hostile political actions is reflected in what happened with its European (NATO) partners recently, as well as with Canada, Mexico, and Greenland, becoming part of the geopolitical pragmatism promoted by the Donald Trump administration. Now, in direct relation to the unipolar geopolitical vision that characterizes U.S. foreign policy, it oscillates between defending the interests of the conservative Establishment and the postulates and ideals promoted by the AFPI [5], which maintain a clear influence in the conduct of U.S. foreign policy, acting as a think tank. Regarding this matter related to the influence of AFPI in the Donald Trump administration, it is worth mentioning some aspects associated with the practice of U.S. foreign policy for a better understanding of its current dynamics, which revolve around a new global fundamentalism with a marked unipolar geopolitical vision. Among them, we have the following: New global fundamentalism against the conservative national security establishment The AFPI serves as the main think tank for the Trump administration, according to Seibt (2024), who in his article “The America First Policy Institute, a discreet ‘combat’ machine for Donald Trump” [6], states the following: “America First” is often associated solely with Donald Trump’s isolationism. But behind the scenes, it is also linked to an ultra-conservative think tank with growing influence, the America First Policy Institute (AFPI)” (1); a fact that justifies the appointments made before and after Donald Trump’s swearing-in as President of the U.S., as he has been using an increasingly influential group in high-level decisions, subtly and systematically modifying changes in strategic agendas from the so-called “Deep State,” starting from what Seibt (2024) also refers to: “…the election of Brooke Rollins marks the consecration of AFPI’s influence, of which she is president, and which has been described by the New York Times as ‘a group as influential as it is little known’ in the orbit of Trumpism… Brooke Rollins is not the only person from AFPI that Donald Trump has chosen for his future government. Linda McMahon, chosen to be Secretary of Education, is the director of this think tank. And let us not forget Pam Bondi, who has been called to replace the too-controversial Matt Gaetz as Attorney General, and who oversees all the legal matters of the America First Policy Institute” (para. 5). In this context, there is clear evidence of AFPI’s influence within the Trump administration; therefore, to understand where the unipolar geopolitical vision recently adopted by the U.S. is headed — together with its prospective analysis — it is necessary to understand, from the very foundations of AFPI, how this organization envisions the path of what it calls, from a supremacist perspective, “America First.” To this end, it is enough to review the main AFPI website [7], where both its vision and analysis of what the U.S. should be, as well as how it should approach the exercise of foreign policy, are broken down and organized — with a curious detail that sets it apart: placing the interests of the American people above the interests of the conservative National Security establishment, stimulating the need to create a nation different from what they consider a “theoretical United States.” As AFPI (2025) states and describes: The Center for American Security at the America First Policy Institute defends Americans rather than a “theoretical United States” imagined by Washington’s national security establishment. The exercise of American power requires a clear justification, and an “America First” approach ensures that such power is used for the benefit of Americans. To promote this objective, the Center seeks to ensure the rigorous advancement of policies that constitute an authentically American alternative to the increasingly obsolete orthodoxy of Washington’s foreign and defense policy… (para. 2). As outlined, AFPI both promotes and warns about the exercise of power, prioritizing U.S. interests, as long as these remain distant from what it considers the “obsolete orthodoxy of foreign policy” that has characterized the U.S. for decades and centuries. In this sense, the likelihood increases of perceiving the presence or formation of a different establishment in the U.S., one that rivals the Anglo-Saxon conservatism rooted since the nation’s very founding. Domestically, the perception of a new global fundamentalism in U.S. foreign policy grows — one with an even more marked unipolar geopolitical vision of an imperialist nature — based on what AFPI (2025) doctrinally dictates in terms of foreign policy: The phrase “America First” refers to an approach rooted in the awareness of the United States’ unique role in the world and its unparalleled ability to do the most for others when its people are strong, secure, and prosperous. It means that any commitment of American lives or dollars abroad must bring concrete benefits to the American people. Every investment of U.S. resources must generate a substantial security benefit (para. 3). From this, it is possible to infer the direction of the U.S. strategic agenda under the current administration and doctrinally supported by AFPI as its main think tank. However, the deep changes that are occurring — both inside and outside the U.S. — and how the global economic and financial situation fluctuates because of these changes, in a certain way, compel major economies to reconsider new mechanisms for economic and financial coordination and cooperation. This includes strengthening regional integration frameworks that allow them to navigate the ongoing process of reconfiguring the current world order, laying the groundwork for the construction of a multipolar world. Proxy Control of Global Territorial Governance, Backed by the “Donroe Doctrine” The exercise of current U.S. foreign policy, characterized by a unipolar geopolitical vision under the new Trump administration, is the result of the application of a doctrine carefully designed and reformulated from its dogmas, supported by a strong religious fundamentalism and associated with racial supremacism; wherein the U.S. seeks to perpetuate its global hegemony by returning to its original imperialist character. All of this turns the exercise of U.S. power toward National Security, but with a practical approach different from the so-called “obsolete orthodoxy of conservative foreign policy.” As AFPI (2021) has emphasized since its founding: Religious freedom is a fundamental human right guaranteed not only in the Constitution of the United States but also in Article 18 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It is a natural right inherent to all of humanity (para. 3). With the above, at first glance, AFPI appears to delineate its religious fundamentalism, oriented toward the promotion of a new global fundamentalism through the exercise of foreign policy that justifies its actions in favor of U.S. supremacist interests, in line with what AFPI (2021) reiterates as its mission on its platform: AFPI exists to promote policies that prioritize the American people. Our guiding principles are freedom, free enterprise, national greatness, U.S. military superiority, foreign policy engagement in the interest of the United States, and the primacy of American workers, families, and communities in all we do (para. 1). To this, we must add the disposition — regarding national security — of driving U.S. supremacism through the application of Hard Power [8], economic warfare, and the increased implementation of Unilateral Coercive Measures (UCMs) against any country that contravenes U.S. interests, by perpetuating interventionist policy in all spheres of power (economic, political, social, geographic, cultural, environmental, and military). An example of the above is referred to by AFPI (2025) on its website [9], as follows: The American victories in World War II and the Cold War established our country as “the last best hope for man on Earth.” The cause of freedom everywhere in the world depends on a strong United States. With our country secure, we can, with greater confidence, promote American security abroad. U.S. security is exemplified by a strong military, fair trade agreements, alliances that are equitable, aggressors who are isolated, and those who harm us, destroyed. The AFPI views American security abroad as a prerequisite for peace at home: always putting American interests first. This includes moving away from endless and unnecessary wars to rebuild the homeland, while also understanding our indispensable role in maintaining a peaceful world… (para. 4). With a brief reading of the above, it is possible to see at first glance the practical description of current U.S. foreign policy, starting from the fact of recent attempts to end the Ukrainian conflict; however, skepticism when addressing both the geopolitical feasibility and the reliability of the proposals made by the Trump administration reveals a hidden objective, particularly associated with proxy control of global territorial governance through hostile policies and the use of the government itself as a weapon. An example of this is the stimulation of a trade war by the U.S. against Canada, Mexico, and the European Union (NATO allies), all with the aim of establishing as a rule the use of Hard Power for political persuasion over strategic resources — an example of this being the recent (and forcibly) signed rare earths agreement by Ukraine — in favor of the United States. U.S.-CUM, a New Nation-State and Persuasive Technology: Utopia or Global Geopolitical Threat? Geopolitical changes in the 21st century are advancing in parallel with technology, the economy, and global energy interdependence. For this reason, the use of Persuasive Technologies [10], through various media and information channels, plays a fundamental role in creating opinion frameworks and the mass manipulation of perceptions on a global scale. In other words, in the Era of Disinformation, technology is the primary tool, stemming from the communication needs of modern society. In this regard, Tusa et al. (2019) state the following: “…fake news has always existed. What is happening now is a greater emergence on open and free access platforms, which causes this type of information to grow exponentially in a matter of seconds. Therefore, fake news creates a wave of disinformation, a fact that motivates academia and civil society to counter it, to achieve the return of good journalism and truthful information” (20). [11] In this context, current disinformation processes respond to pre-established objectives by power poles linked to fluctuating geoeconomic interests in the world order, in which the Global North with a unipolar geopolitical vision and the Global South with a multipolar geopolitical vision are in open confrontation. In relation to this, Valton (2022) points out: “…economic globalization, finance, and the development of new technologies have opened spaces for the new geoeconomy. Thus, geoeconomy as part of the process of change plays an essential role that affects international relations, with an impact on international trade, global markets, and conflicts in the quest for capital accumulation. Geopolitical interests are closely linked to the economic gains of major capitalist powers and transnational corporations in their eagerness to increase their revenues, maintain and expand their area of influence in other regions, at the expense of the indiscriminate exploitation of the natural resources of underdeveloped countries, with high poverty rates and environmental damage” (2). [12] Now, considering the unipolar geopolitical vision of U.S. foreign policy and the doctrinal influence of the AFPI in the new Trump administration, there is a curious growing communication campaign on different digital platforms, specifically associated with persuasive technologies, that fosters the perception of the creation of a new State called U.S.-CUM. While this corresponds to a very subtle disinformation campaign and somewhat utopian in nature, it is nonetheless surprising that, in the facts and actions of the new White House administration, they have not stopped flirting with certain ideas related to the mentioned State in question.   To be more specific, the U.S.-CUM is a utopian idea of a territorial expansion of the current United States, adding the territorial spaces of Canada and Mexico with the goal of increasing the economic, political, financial, and military capacities of the U.S., to counter emerging powers and prevent the consolidation of a multipolar world. An example of this can be found in some posts made on the Reddit platform, a social network popular among the U.S. population, similar to Instagram, X, TikTok, and Facebook, among others. The U.S.-CUM utopia has now moved from a mere concept to a possible threat to global geopolitics, the moment the foreign policy of the Trump administration suggests the possibility of territorially adding Canada, turning it into the 51st state of the United States. Colvin (2025), in his AP article titled “Trump says he is serious about making Canada the 51st U.S. state,” refers to the following: President Donald Trump said he was serious about wanting Canada to become the 51st state of the United States in an interview aired Sunday during the Super Bowl pregame show… The United States is not subsidizing Canada. Americans purchase products from the resource-rich nation, including raw materials such as oil. Although the goods trade deficit has grown in recent years to $72 billion in 2023, it largely reflects U.S. imports of Canadian energy… (paras. 1-4). [13] In relation to the same policy undertaken with Canada, the Trump administration began a very dangerous strategy against its territorial neighbors, with the following actions: declaring Mexican drug cartels as terrorist groups (knowing how the U.S. has manipulated the concept of terrorism to justify military interventions), implementing migrant deportation policies, waging a fight against fentanyl, and additionally launching a tariff war with both Mexico and Canada. It has also reiterated its intention to annex Greenland, accompanied by threats of tariffs and a trade war against Denmark and other EU countries, including undermining the existence of NATO. All the above is carried out under the close advice and influence of the AFPI, clearly reflected in its supremacist doctrinal positions and aspirations to create a large imperialist nation. An example of these ambitions has been openly published by various international media outlets, including the news channel FRANCE24. In this outlet, Blandón (2025) refers to the following: During a meeting with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, U.S. President Donald Trump reiterated that control of Greenland is necessary to improve international security, while once again confirming his interest in annexing this territory… Outgoing Greenland Prime Minister Mute Egede responded on the social network Facebook: “The U.S. president has once again raised the idea of annexing us. Enough is enough!”, and added that he will call on the leaders of all parties to convince them to prevent it… (paras. 1, 2).   In other words, it is appropriate to infer that the direction and intentionality of the foreign policy of the new Trump administration is aimed at territorial expansionism and the promotion of proxy control of global territorial governance, supported by the “Donroe Doctrine” and enhanced through the use and development of Persuasive Technology, aligned with a global strategic agenda (influenced by the AFPI), which seeks to counter the strengthening of a multipolar world and perpetuate U.S. imperialist hegemony under a global supremacy fundamentalism. CELAC as a Geopolitical Counterweight to the Real Threat of the U.S. and Its New Imperialist Format for Hegemonic Survival The Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), as an intergovernmental organization, currently acquires strategic value for the entire continent and its sustainable development, within the framework of creating new mechanisms for coordination, cooperation, and regional integration with Africa and Asia — especially China — through the Belt and Road Initiative, considering the entire current geopolitical context where markets play a predominant role in defining internal policies and in directly influencing the strategic agendas of each nation's foreign policy, according to constantly changing global challenges, heightened by the stance adopted by the Global North, led by the U.S., against the Global South, led by BRICS countries. Once the real threat posed by the U.S. has been identified — based on the unipolar geopolitical vision that has characterized the exercise of its foreign policy — this is compounded by the supremacist trend in implementing Unilateral Coercive Measures (UCMs) [14] against free and independent nations that, upholding the principle of self-determination, do not submit to or share the interests of the Anglo-Saxon establishment, promoted by the new U.S. administration. Now then, conducting a prospective analysis of how and on what grounds the U.S. sustains and describes its current hegemonic behavior, it is possible to predict, with certain elements and data, what its courses of action will be — courses that Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as Africa and Asia (especially China), should consider. Among these, the following stand out: Territorial Expansion of the U.S. Trade War The current trade war declared between the U.S., Canada, and Mexico — initially through the reciprocal imposition of tariffs — considering the influence of the AFPI as a U.S. Think Tank, is clearly perceived as territorial expansion, in search of proxy control over territorial governance previously mentioned, of all strategic resources in Latin America and the Caribbean. This comes because of the fiscal, economic, and financial weakening the U.S. is experiencing through the increase of public debt, which is practically unsustainable. In this sense, the actions taken by the Trump administration in appointing certain cabinet positions can be understood to some extent. However, it is curious and at the same time causal that many appointments obey and are related — directly and indirectly — to the training of officials associated with and linked to the AFPI, as part of its strategic objective. An example of this are the words of Colonel Robert Wilkie, co-chair of the Center for American Security, member of the AFPI, quoted by King (2025) in his press article titled “AFPI Welcomes President Trump’s Renewal of the American Dream”, where the following was stated, making direct reference to peace through strength: President Trump proclaimed that America is back, which means our Armed Forces are back: the greatest force for peace in the history of the world. He has restored the highest combat standards so that our soldiers fight, win, and return home to their loved ones as soon as possible. President Trump has restored the place of honor our warriors hold in the hearts and minds of the American people. He has restored America’s deterrent power and told the world that the most powerful words in the language are: “I am an American citizen.” Our borders are stronger, our seas safer, and every wrongdoer knows that the eagle is watching them. (para. 6) The above statement does not set aside its imperialist and supremacist character, denoting the philosophical and doctrinal thinking deeply rooted in the officials who hold government functions at all decision-making levels, promoting pro-U.S. policies that disrespect international law and encourage the establishment of a rules-based world order, with full disregard for the international rule of law. This is, in fact, a very complex and dangerous geopolitical situation, which threatens not only the self-determination of peoples, but also the ability to advance in areas of coordination, cooperation, and integration to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) adopted in the United Nations 2030 Agenda, to which CELAC countries adhere through the implementation of development plans seeking mutual benefit. Now then, the world order is in permanent change, with a tendency toward the consolidation of a multipolar world because of the crisis of capitalism and the Anglo-Saxon economic model represented in the Bretton Woods System. This situation favors the opening of new mechanisms supported by the multipolarity of international relations, depending on the behavior of the world economy, as a result of the policies of both the U.S. and emerging powers—especially the BRICS countries. However, it is precisely the economic pulse that will redefine the hostile actions of the U.S. in defense of its global hegemonic power, equally and in parallel influenced by the energy capacities of the world powers in conflict — an element that is preponderant in geopolitical influence. An example in this chapter is Russia’s advantage in gas and oil during the Ukrainian conflict. The exponential economic growth of the BRICS compared to the G7 is the clearest expression of the multilateral influence trend of member countries, in line with the multipolarity of international relations, where the geopolitical positioning of both the Global North (G7) and the Global South (BRICS) can be clearly observed. This economic and financial disparity accelerates the weakening of the Bretton Woods System and, consequently, the collapse of the dollar system within the Anglo-Saxon economic model, leading to the loss of hegemonic influence of the Global North countries — especially the U.S. as its main exponent. Other data are relevant when conducting a prospective analysis, with the aim of identifying growth and sustainable development opportunities, as well as understanding the challenges to achieving strategic objectives for comprehensive development by nations. Among the data to consider in the prospective analysis, we have the following chart, associated with excessive global consumption in the 21st century compared to the 20th century:   According to the chart on excessive global consumption, in only six years of progress into the 21st century, modern society has exceeded more than half of what it consumed in the 20th century, with a 75% increase above the average recorded over the last 100 years — a truly alarming percentage with a tendency to increase, as a consequence of economic activity, technological advancement, and the increase of armed conflicts worldwide. Within this context, the U.S. will increasingly seek to influence countries that significantly represent an economic interest in terms of territory, population density, manufacturing and industrial capacity, and geographic position. Through proxy control of territorial governance, it will aim to increase its hegemonic capacity in the economic and financial spheres against its main geopolitical rivals in the struggle for global supremacy — namely Russia and China — whose multipolar geopolitical vision entirely rivals the unipolar geopolitical vision of U.S. foreign policy. Given this scenario, CELAC presents a fundamental characteristic that allows it to move forward as a geopolitical counterweight to the U.S., broken down as follows:Territorial extension: all member countries together cover an enormous territorial space rich in strategic resources, with common areas of influence and mutual interest for sustainable development. Shared future, based on history, language, customs, and other cultural expressions that strengthen Latin American and Caribbean identity, which can be leveraged in the processes of regional consultation, cooperation, and integration with Africa and Asia. The increase in the hostile trend of U.S. foreign policy worldwide will require greater effort from CELAC to advance in consolidating full regional integration. However, the current progress of the intergovernmental organization has been limited to certain and specific areas, namely the economic, cultural, social, and political spheres of its members. Transition toward the Confederation of Latin American and Caribbean States as a strategy for geopolitical counterbalance and sustainable development For CELAC to consolidate itself as a geopolitical counterweight to U.S. hegemonic ambitions in the region, it must be grounded in the exercise of a foreign policy with a multipolar geopolitical vision, compatible with the mutual sustainable development interests of the Global South. In this regard, Palacio de Oteyza (2004), in his essay "The Imperial Image of the New International Order: Is This Political Realism?" states the following: “The second realistic image of the international order, partially compatible with the geoeconomic image, consists of a return to a traditional multipolar system of balance of power, but with a decisive weight given to the military factor. The multipolar system is characterized by the absence of a hegemon and a flexibility of alliances among the great powers, aimed at restraining any potential challenger” [13]. In this context, the geopolitical counterweight that CELAC needs to confront the U.S.’s hegemonic ambitions in the region — and even globally — is regional integration in other areas not currently contemplated by the Community of Nations due to its nature. That is, increasing integration in the military, geographic, and social spheres through the transition toward a confederation of nations would enhance international relations capabilities, contributing to the adoption of deterrent measures for the prevention of armed conflicts and even facilitating its integration into other centers of power with a multipolar geopolitical vision, such as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), to further strengthen relations with both Russia and China and their respective sustainable development plans. Economic opening and new formulas for regional integration with Africa and Asia An economic opening is the result of the globalization process, the advancement of new technologies, and the effects of the exercise of states’ foreign policies in accordance with their interests and the geopolitical vision they adopt, for geopolitical analysis that enables the identification of risks, threats, and opportunities in the international arena. That said, within the framework of regional integration, CELAC must also prioritize investment sectors for the establishment of common development interests among CELAC, Africa, and Asia. One of the most notable current realities is the fact that the Global South’s economy began systematically, setting challenges and then experiencing growth in less time compared to the growth of the G20, led by the U.S., with China taking the lead according to the percentage value recorded in 2024. In this scenario, CELAC, by reconsidering its transition toward a Confederation of Latin American and Caribbean States, would allow for greater autonomy in its integration into the global architecture implied by the strengthening and consolidation of the BRICS at the global level as an alternative system to the Bretton Woods System. In doing so, advances toward strengthening regional integration — embedded within a new multipolar world, with the combined capabilities of the Global South — can become, more than a reality, a necessity to confront the real threats posed by the U.S., serving as a geopolitical counterweight and a tool for insertion into the multipolar world through continental alliances between Latin America and the Caribbean, with Africa and Asia. Conclusions It was possible to assess the leading role of CELAC and its strategic nature in defending the regional interests of Latin America and the Caribbean, opening a world of opportunities in trade relations with Asia and Africa for the construction of a multipolar world through the promotion of China’s Belt and Road Initiative as an alternative mechanism to confront the U.S. economic war on a global scale and its project to create the so-called “U.S.-CUM”, as part of its foreign policy based on its national security interests. In this regard, in an environment of geopolitical changes and international crisis, as part of the transition process toward the consolidation of a multipolar world, CELAC can promote or drive significant advances aimed at the creation of a Confederation of Latin American and Caribbean Nations (CONLAC) as part of a strategy for integration with Asia and Africa, considering the multipolar geopolitical vision shared by the Global South, where the concept of shared development represents a key point for international dialogue and cooperation — specifically in the economic, social, political, geographic, cultural, environmental, and military spheres. All of this would serve to act as a geopolitical counterweight to the threats and global challenges promoted by the U.S., in the exercise of its unipolar geopolitical vision in foreign policy, of an imperialist, hegemonic, and supremacist nature. Notes [1] Fuente: https://celacinternational.org/projects/[2] Revista Comunicación. Año 45, vol. 33, núm. 1, enero-junio 2024 (pp. 120-133). Fuente: https:// www.scielo.sa.cr/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1659-38202024000100120[3] Conjunto de personas, instituciones y entidades influyentes en la sociedad o en un campo determinado, que procuran mantener y controlar el orden establecido. Fuente: https://dpej.rae. es/lema/establishment[4] https://gaceta.politicas.unam.mx/index.php/poder-estadounidense/[5] https://americafirstpolicy.com/issues/security/national-security-defense[6] https://www.france24.com/es/ee-uu-y-canad%C3%A1/20241126-el-america-first-policy-institute-una-discreta-m%C3%A1quina-de-combate-de-donald-trump[7] https://americafirstpolicy.com/centers/center-for-american-security[8] El poder duro se da cuando un país utiliza medios militares y económicos para influir en el comportamiento o los intereses de otras entidades políticas. Es una forma de poder político a menudo agresiva, es decir, que utiliza la coerción. Su eficacia es máxima cuando una entidad política la impone a otra de menor poder militar o económico. Fuente: https://www. jagranjosh.com/general-knowledge/what-isthe-difference-between-hard-power-and-softpower-1608095574-1[9] https://americafirstpolicy.com/centers/center-for-american-security[10] La tecnología persuasiva está concebida para permitir que los usuarios voluntariamente cambien sus actitudes o comportamientos por medio de la persuasión y la influencia social. Al igual que la tecnología de control, utiliza actuadores y un algoritmo de influencia para ofrecerle información eficaz al usuario. Fuente: https://osha.europa.eu/es/tools-and-resources/eu-osha-thesaurus/term/70213i#:~:text=Context:,ofrecerle%20informaci%C3%B3n%20eficaz%20al%20usuario[11] https://revistas.usfq.edu.ec/index.php/perdebate/article/view/1550/2661[12] Fuente: https://www.cipi.cu/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/1-elaynevalton.pdf[13] https://apnews.com/article/trump-canadagolfo-america-super-bowl-bret-baier-musk-cc8848639493d44770e60e4d125e5a62[14] Medidas Coercitivas Unilaterales.[15] Revista CIDOB d’Afers Internacionals, núm. 64, p. 7-28 References Colvin, J. (2025, 9 de febrero). Trump dice que habla en serio al afirmar que Canadá sea el estado 51 de EEUU. AP News. https://apnews.com/article/trump-canada-golfo-america-super-bowl-bret-baier-musk-cc8848639493d44770e60e4d125e5a62Corte, M. (2018, 7 de mayo). Análisis del ‘establishment’ estadounidense. Gaceta UNAM. https://gaceta.politicas.unam.mx/index.php/poder-estadounidense/Guendel Angulo, H. (2024). Escenarios de transición: De la geopolítica mundial unipolar a la multipolar. Revista Comunicación On-line. https://www.scielo.sa.cr/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1659-38202024000100120Palacio de Oteyza, V. (2003). La imagen imperial del nuevo orden internacional: ¿es esto realismo político? Revista CIDOB d’Afers Internacionals, (64), 7-28. https://www.cidob.org/publicaciones/la-imagen-imperial-del-nuevo-orden-internacional-es-esto-realismo-politicoSeibt, S. (2024, 26 de noviembre). El America First Policy Institute, una discreta máquina de "combate" de Donald Trump. France24. https://www.france24.com/es/ee-uu-y-canad%C3%A1/20241126-el-america-first-policy-institute-una-discreta-m%C3%A1quina-de-combate-de-donald-trumpTusa, F., & Durán, M. B. (2019). La era de la desinformación y de las noticias falsas en el ambiente político ecuatoriano de transición. Perdebate. https://revistas.usfq.edu.ec/index.php/perdebate/article/view/1550/2661Valton Legrá, E. (2022). La geopolítica de la tecnología: una visión sistémica. CIPI. https://www.cipi.cu/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/1-elaynevalton.pdfZelada Castedo, A. (2005). Perspectiva histórica del proceso de integración latinoamericana. Revista Ciencia y Cultura, (17), 113-120. Universidad Católica Boliviana San Pablo, La Paz, Bolivia.

A new maritime chessboard is emerging across the Indian Ocean. Over the past decade, China has transformed several African ports into strategic outposts. What began as trade-focused infrastructure under the Belt and Road Initiative has evolved into a network of dual-use facilities with both commercial and military potential. At the forefront is Djibouti, where China established its first overseas military base in 2017, located just a few miles from the US Camp Lemonnier. Positioned at the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, a chokepoint through which nearly ten percent of global oil flows, the base grants Beijing critical surveillance and logistical capabilities. Since its establishment, the base has supported PLA Navy operations, including anti-piracy missions and amphibious training exercises, signalling a shift toward power projection. Further south, Tanzania’s Bagamoyo Port and Kenya’s Lamu Port underscore China’s ambitions across the western Indian Ocean. Though Bagamoyo was suspended in 2019 amid sovereignty concerns, the project’s blueprint remains an ongoing strategic ambition for Beijing. China’s strategic ports in Africa: from commerce to control  China’s port investments along Africa’s eastern seaboard are part of a broader plan to embed influence at key maritime chokepoints. The Djibouti base enables far-seas naval operations and intelligence reach. Kenya’s Lamu Port, while not Chinese-controlled, holds strategic potential as a future logistics hub aligned with Beijing’s maritime ambitions. Other reports suggest interest in Equatorial Guinea’s Bata Port, Sudan’s Port Sudan, and Mozambique’s Nacala, indicating a westward expansion of China’s Indian Ocean footprint. These ports offer China access to vital transit routes and reinforce its capacity to sustain long-range naval deployments. The combination of civilian infrastructure with military potential—known as dual-use facilities—grants the PLA Navy flexibility in both peacetime and contingency operations. This growing footprint represents a subtle yet steady attempt to lock in strategic leverage across one of the world’s busiest maritime corridors. Together, these facilities provide China with a triangulated presence across the Red Sea, Horn of Africa, and Mozambique Channel—impacting vital Indian trade and energy routes. They also provide Beijing with the means to gather maritime intelligence, secure sea lines of communication, and possibly influence regional political calculations. India’s ocean strategy: recalibrating amid encirclement  India’s response is strategic and distributed. Under the SAGAR (Security and Growth for All in the Region) doctrine, India promotes inclusive maritime development and regional stability. Rather than build permanent bases, India pursues access agreements. It is upgrading Agalega Island (Mauritius), maintaining interest in Seychelles’ Assumption Island, and enjoying naval access to Oman’s Duqm Port. Since 2017, mission-based deployments have ensured near-continuous presence in the Gulf of Aden. These deployments allow the Indian Navy to maintain a forward presence in key hotspots while avoiding the political baggage of foreign bases. They also improve responsiveness to humanitarian assistance and disaster relief operations, anti-piracy missions, and regional crises. For example, during the 2023 Sudan crisis, the Indian Navy swiftly launched Operation Kaveri to evacuate over 3,800 Indian and foreign nationals. Similarly, India’s proactive anti-piracy patrols in the Gulf of Aden have ensured the safe passage of thousands of merchant vessels over the past decade. This mobile posture reinforces India’s reputation as a reliable first responder in the region. India also prioritises multilateral cooperation. It hosts the Milan naval exercise and participates in engagements like IBSAMAR (with Brazil and South Africa) and La Pérouse (with Quad plus navies). Coordination with France has deepened, with joint patrols near Réunion Island under a logistics agreement. Such engagements are not only tactical, they are political statements of alignment and trust. They underscore India’s growing capability to coordinate complex maritime missions and signal its intention to lead from within regional frameworks rather than dominate them. In 2023, India launched an expanded outreach through its Information Fusion Centre, Indian Ocean Region (IFC-IOR), collaborating with East African coastal states on maritime domain awareness, hydrography, and port call diplomacy. The IFC-IOR serves as a hub for sharing real-time data, boosting early warning capacity, and deterring illegal maritime activities such as trafficking, Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated (IUU) fishing, and piracy. While China’s approach emphasises large-scale infrastructure development, India is constructing a maritime presence that places greater emphasis on trust-building, transparency, and regional alignment. In a space increasingly shaped by port politics, India’s focus on utility over ubiquity signals a long-term commitment to maritime stability. Indo-African Arc: diplomatic realignment  India’s diplomatic vision is evolving into an Indo-African maritime arc. The Asia-Africa Growth Corridor (AAGC), co-developed with Japan, aims to offer transparent, locally owned alternatives to China’s model. Though still aspirational, it signals India’s strategic intentions. India’s engagement in the Indian Ocean Rim Association (IORA) further anchors its presence through initiatives on disaster relief, fisheries, climate resilience, and blue economy development. India’s hydrographic cooperation with Kenya—through naval surveys, nautical chart hand‑over, and personnel training—as well as similar support for EEZ surveillance in Tanzania, all reinforce a partnership‑driven maritime presence. In Madagascar, Comoros, and Mozambique, Indian assistance in capacity building and climate adaptation has strengthened India’s maritime diplomacy by projecting it as a credible development partner Beyond government initiatives, India’s increasing outreach through Track 1.5 and Track 2 dialogues demonstrates a broader understanding of strategic influence. Narratives of South-South cooperation, shared colonial histories, and inclusive development resonate deeply across African coastal nations. India’s strategy diverges from China’s in both intent and execution. While Beijing favours physical infrastructure, India offers capacity building and cooperative frameworks. This appeals to regional states increasingly wary of debt diplomacy. The emphasis on skill-sharing, maritime governance, and local ownership reflects India’s confidence in a more horizontal model of engagement. Should India opt for counterbalance or coexistence? As China deepens its Indian Ocean presence, India must remain agile. It is not matching China port-for-port but building coalitions, enhancing indigenous capability, and advancing a maritime order rooted in rules and reciprocity. Strategic cooperation with France, the US, Japan, and Australia—including the India-France-Australia trilateral—widens India’s operational theatre without hard alignments. Domestically, initiatives like Make in India and institutions like the Naval Innovation and Indigenization Organisation foster autonomy and modernisation. These reforms enhance India’s ability to sustain blue water operations and reduce dependency on foreign suppliers. Strategic horizons beyond the harbor  The evolving maritime landscape in the western Indian Ocean is more than a competition over ports; it is a contest over norms, access, and the architecture of regional security. China’s approach, anchored in infrastructural assertiveness and long-term presence, represents a significant shift in Indian Ocean geopolitics. India, in contrast, is building a decentralised yet durable framework of partnerships, access agreements, and institutional trust. India’s strategy is not merely reactionary; it is rooted in its vision of a free, open, and inclusive maritime space. By blending strategic realism with normative commitment, India offers coastal African states and island nations an alternative that emphasises sovereignty, sustainability, and shared development. This layered maritime engagement, ensures that India remains a credible and constructive player in the region. In the long run, strategic patience may prove more effective than infrastructural ambition. While China’s port-led strategy seeks control through presence, India is cultivating influence through principles. As regional nations assert agency and seek balanced partnerships, India’s maritime model could become not only preferable but indispensable. Moreover, the Indian Ocean’s future will not be determined solely by naval strength or economic muscle, but by who can foster the most resilient and inclusive partnerships. The contest is as much about ideas as it is about assets. India’s model, grounded in cooperation rather than coercion, is increasingly well-suited to the aspirations of coastal African nations navigating a multipolar maritime environment. If the Indian Ocean is to remain a space of peace, prosperity, and pluralism, it will require leadership anchored in legitimacy and cooperation. In choosing that path, India may well secure more than maritime advantage-it may shape the very character of the Indo-African seascape for decades to come. Dr Amit Kumar Singh is a researcher in International Relations with core specialisation in India’s foreign policy, Indo-Pacific studies, maritime security and geopolitics. This article is published under a Creative Commons License and may be republished with attribution.

A new vision for Middle East peace emerged this week which proposes the withdrawal of Israel from Gaza and the West Bank, the disarming and disbanding of Hamas and the creation of a unified Palestinian state. The plan emerged from a “high-level conference” in New York on July 29, which assembled representatives of 17 states, the European Union and the Arab League. The resulting proposal is “a comprehensive and actionable framework for the implementation of the two-state solution and the achievement of peace and security for all”. Signatories include Turkey and the Middle Eastern states of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Egypt and Jordan. Europe was represented by France, Ireland, Italy, Norway, Spain and the UK. Indonesia was there for Asia, Senegal for Africa, and Brazil, Canada and Mexico for the Americas. Neither the US nor Israel were present. Significantly, it is the first time the Arab states have called for Hamas to disarm and disband. But, while condemning Hamas’s attack on Israel of October 7 2023 and recalling that the taking of hostages is a violation of international law, the document is unsparing in its connection between a state of Palestine and an end to Israel’s assault on Gaza’s civilians. It says: “Absent decisive measures toward the two-state solution and robust international guarantees, the conflict will deepen and regional peace will remain elusive.” A plan for the reconstruction of Gaza will be developed by the Arab states and the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation – a Jeddah-based group which aims to be the collective voice of the Muslim world – supported by an international fund. The details will be hammered out at a Gaza Reconstruction and Recovery Conference, to be held in Cairo. It is a bold initiative. In theory, it could end the Israeli mass killing in Gaza, remove Hamas from power and begin the implementation of a process for a state of Palestine. The question is whether it has any chance of success. First, there appears to be growing momentum to press ahead with recognition of the state of Palestine as part of a comprehensive peace plan leading to a two-state solution. France, the UK and, most recently, Canada have announced they would take that step at the UN general assembly in September. The UK stated that it would do so unless Israel agreed to a ceasefire and the commencement of a substantive peace process. These announcements follow those made in May 2024 by Spain, Ireland and Norway, three of the other European signatories. By the end of September at least 150 of the UN’s 193 members will recognise Palestinian statehood. Recognition is largely symbolic without a ceasefire and Israeli withdrawal from both Gaza and the West Bank. But it is essential symbolism. For years, many European countries, Canada, Australia and the US have said that recognition could not be declared if there was the prospect of Israel-Palestine negotiations. Now the sequence is reversed: recognition is necessary as pressure for a ceasefire and the necessary talks to ensure the security of both Israelis and Palestinians. Israel accelerated that reversal at the start of March, when it rejected the scheduled move to phase two of the six-week ceasefire negotiated with the help of the US, and imposed a blockade on aid coming into the Strip. The Netanyahu government continues to hold out against the ceasefire. But its loud blame of Hamas is becoming harder to accept. The images of the starvation in Gaza and warnings by doctors, humanitarian organisations and the UN of an effective famine with the deaths of thousands can no longer be denied. Saudi Arabia and Qatar, behind the scenes and through their embassies, have been encouraging European countries to make the jump to recognition. Their efforts at the UN conference in New York this week are another front of that campaign. Israel and the Trump administration But in the short term, there is little prospect of the Netanyahu government giving way with its mass killing, let alone entering talks for two states. Notably neither Israel nor the US took part in the conference. Trump has criticised the scenes of starvation in Gaza. But his administration has joined Netanyahu in vitriolic denunciation of France and the UK over their intentions to recognise Palestine. And the US president has warned the Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, that recognition of Palestinian statehood would threaten Canada’s trade deal with the US. In response to Trump’s concern over the images of starving children and his exhortation “We’ve got to get the kids fed,” Israel has airdropped a few pallets of aid – less than a truck’s worth. Yet this appears more of a public relations exercise directed at Washington than a genuine attempt to ease the terrible condition on the Strip. A small number of lorries with supplies from UN and humanitarian organisations have also crossed the border, but only after lengthy delays and with half still held up. There is no security for transport and delivery of the aid inside Gaza. A sacrifice for a state? So the conference declaration is not relief for Gaza. Instead, it is yet another marker of Israel’s increasing isolation. After France’s announcement, the Netanyahu government thundered: “Such a move rewards terror and risks creating another Iranian proxy … A Palestinian state in these conditions would be a launch pad to annihilate Israel.” But while recognising Hamas’s mass killing of October 7 2023, most governments and their populations do not perceive Israel as attacking Hamas and its fighters. They see the Netanyahu government and Israeli military slaying and starving civilians. Even in the US, where the Trump administration is trying to crush sympathy for Palestine and Gazans in universities, non-governmental organisations and the public sphere, opinion is shifting. In a Gallup poll taken in the US and released on July 29, only 32% of respondents supported Israel’s actions in Gaza – an all-time low – and 60% opposed them. Netanyahu was viewed unfavourably by 52% and favourably by only 29%. Israel has lost its moment of “normalisation” with Arab states. Its economic links are strained and its oft-repeated claim to being the “Middle East’s only democracy” is bloodstained beyond recognition. This will be of no comfort to the people of Gaza facing death. But in the longer term, there is the prospect that this sacrifice will be the catalyst to recognise Palestine that disappeared in 1948.

In August 2021 the world watched as thousands of people, both Americans and Afghans, crowded onto airplanes at the Kabul airport to escape the return of the Taliban. By the end of August 2021, the United States had evacuated over 200,000 people. On August 15, 2021, Afghan president Ashraf Ghani fled the country, and the Taliban seized control of Kabul calling themselves the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. The collapse of the Islamic Republic was predicated on the United States-Taliban deal that was signed in February of 2020. Most people assumed the Taliban would be unable to govern Afghanistan and that their government would not last. After all they were rural tribal people with a fundamental belief in a primitive version of Islam, and their control of Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001 was in many ways a disaster. But, the Taliban have now led the country for four years, with no end in sight. Arguing that they are following basic Islamic law regarding the proper place for women in society, the Taliban have severely restricted the rights of women, restrictions more severe than in any other Islamic country. The treatment of women is the major reason the Taliban has not been recognized as the legitimate government of Afghanistan by many nations (Drury, 2025). The Taliban have also been denied a seat in the United Nations, again largely because of their treatment of women (Lederer, 2025). Recently the International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for two Taliban leaders, Haibatullah Akhundzada, the supreme leader of Afghanistan, and Abdul Hakim Haqqani, the chief Justice in the Afghan supreme court, for their treatment of women and girls in Afghanistan (Ayre, 2025). Not only are women not allowed to attend school beyond six grade, but they are not allowed to travel outside of their homes without a male companion. Women traveling outside the home must wear a veil that covers their full body. The Gender Inequality Index, a metric developed by the United Nations Development Program as a composite measure of a women’s place in society, is based on three dimensions: reproductive health, empowerment, and labor market participation. It ranks Afghanistan one of the lowest the world in terms of the treatment of women in government, education, health and political participation (UNDP, Gender Inequality Index, 2025). Gender based violence has also increased. Afghan women experience a high rate of harassment when they leave their homes. Incidents of stoning and verbal harassment have been widely reported. This harassment and abuse is condoned by the Taliban’s Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, a Taliban government agency that, among other things, dictates where women can go or not go, what women must wear, and how they must behave. Women who do not follow the rules of this Ministry are chastised, harassed, and often beaten. When women are arrested, they often face verbal abuse and torture (Ahmadi, 2023). Afghan women also often have no say in who they marry and many of these forced marriages are a result of poverty which drives fathers to marry off their daughters, often at a young age (Nariman, 2025). There are very few female doctors or nurses in Afghanistan. Because men are prohibited from treating women, let alone seeing them without their veil, women are often unable to access basic medical services. Maternal mortality rates are high compared to other countries. With poor medical help available for pregnant women, it is estimated that approximately 24 women die each day in Afghanistan due to pregnancy related causes. Most of these deaths are the results of complications during childbirth (Gluck, 2023). Because of the lack of medical support, the infant mortality rate for Afghanistan is 62 deaths per 100,000 live births, one of the highest in the world (CIA, 2024). Afghanistan has always been a poor country with high levels of poverty. Since the Taliban takeover poverty has drastically increased, particularly in the rural areas. It is estimated that over 90 percent of the population of Afghanistan is facing poverty and food insecurity (Programme W. F., 2024). The United Nations Development Project estimates that approximately 85 percent of the Afghan population live on less than one dollar per day (UNDP, 2024). The increase in poverty is in part because donors who had previously supported Afghanistan have halted their support. By 2025, Afghanistan had lost about 26 percent of its gross domestic product as many of these international development projects closed, pushing many Afghans out of work and into poverty (Smith, 2024). With the return of President Trump in 2025, the United States stopped all aid to Afghanistan, worsening the situation. Food scarcity falls most heavily on girls, as poor families make the hard choice of feeding boys before the girls. The mortality rate among girls is 90 percent higher than among boys (Bank, 2023). The increasing level of poverty is exacerbated by the large number of Afghan refugees who are being forcefully repatriated from the countries where they had sought exile, mostly from Pakistan and Iran, but also in some cases from European countries and other countries where they sought refuge. The United Nations High Commission for Refugees estimates that over 96,000 Afghans were forcefully deported back to Afghanistan in April of this year alone, and that over 3.4 million Afghan refugees have been deported from Iran and Pakistan since 2023 (UNHCR, 2025). Most of these returning refugees have no home or job to return to. Although the UNHCR sometimes gives returning refugees a small amount of money as they return, most return to poverty and in many cases without homes. These returning refugees most often settle in areas around major cities, especially Kabul, Kandahar, and Herat, creating a large population of unemployed and impoverished families. The returning refugee problem has been exacerbated by the decision by Iran to expel all Afghans. This is apparently a result of the growing Iranian conflict with Israel (Haqiqatyar, 2025). It is not clear why Iran is expelling Afghans, many of whom had been in Iran for decades. It has been suggested that Iran felt that the Afghan’s were sympathetic to Israel and/or the United States and were acting as spies, although there is no evidence of this. It is estimated that over 6 million Afghans had been living in Iran. The United Nations High Commission of Refugees reports that this year over 1.4 million Afghans have returned from Iran (UNHCR, 2025). Many former Afghan government officials have fled Afghanistan or have been killed as political dissent is not allowed and political parties or ideologies that do not support the Taliban are forbidden. Those who have stayed have largely been quiet. The media is controlled by the Ministry of Information and Culture. This includes the control of newspapers, radio, and television. Most reporters and journalists have fled and female journalists are not allowed (Mercier, 2025). Although there is some opposition to the Taliban government, especially by the National Resistance Front, they have accomplished little and do not pose a serious threat to the Taliban (Bowes, 2024). Other groups such as al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, while present in Afghanistan do not pose a serious threat to the Taliban. These shifts have resulted in a marked drop in fighting, which has brought a form of security to the country. Even though the US travel advisory for Afghanistan remains at ‘level four: do not travel’, in fact tourism, although limited, is beginning. The Taliban government encourages tourism because it brings in much needed foreign currency. The Afghan Ministry of Information and Culture, which oversees tourism, reports that there are at least 350 tourism companies operating in Afghanistan (Lateef, 2025). Humanitarian agencies working in rural areas report that it is now possible to travel into remote areas of Afghanistan, areas that were previously either too dangerous to travel to or too remote. This is in part because the Taliban have embraced the Afghan rural population, and while there still areas that may be dangerous to travel to, much of the anti-government sentiment in the rural area is gone (Smith, 2024). Travel outside of Kabul has also improved as roadblocks have been dismantled, bridges repaired, and roads repaved. While there have been reports of petty corruption at the local level in Afghanistan, corruption under Taliban rule has dramatically reduced. Pre 2021, numerous Afghan government officials, as well as American contractors, made fortunes by funnelling off billions of dollars earmarked for public projects. The corruption took place at all levels so that anything one wanted to do involved a bribe. Corruption was especially found in customs and border checkpoints. It is estimated that during the Republic over 1.4 billion dollars were illegally collected at border checkpoints annually (SIGAR, 2016). Much of this corruption has been eliminated under Taliban rule. Finally, before the Taliban takeover, Afghanistan was the world’s top producer of opium which is used to make Heroin. The Taliban imposed a ban on growing opium in the spring of 2022, with the exception that farmers were allowed to harvest their standing crop. It is estimated that in 2024 about 12,800 hectares of poppies were grown, down from before the ban when farmers planted over 233,000 hectares (Mishra, 2024). However, largely because of economic difficulties, farmers are beginning to grow opium again, even if it is forbidden by the government in Kabul (Mishra, 2024). In sum, despite dire predictions of many the Tailban have managed to stay in power for four years and now seem to exercise firm control of Afghanistan. As explored in this article, they have apparently done some things well and some things poorly – and the international community should expect to see Taliban rule as a fixture in Afghanistan’s near term future. Works CitedAhmadi, B. (2023, December 7). How the Taliban Enable Violence Against women. Retrieved from United States Institute of Peace: https://www.usip.org/publications/2023/12/how-taliban-enables-violence-against-womenAyre, M. (2025, July 8). France24. Retrieved from ICC issues arrest warrant for Taliban leaders over persecution of Afghan women: https://www.france24.com/en/asia-pacific/20250708-icc-issues-arrest-warrants-for-taliban-leaders-over-persecution-of-afghan-womenCIA. (2024). Infant Mortality Rate. Retrieved from World Factbook: https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/field/infant-mortality-rate/Committee, I. R. (2022, December 22). Afghanistan: An entire [opulation pushed into poverty. 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Abstract Buffeted by the headwinds of US unilateralism, Europeans and Canadians are bound together in a community of fate. As the US departs the field, Europe and Canada need to cooperate more. To avoid being abandoned, they need to avail themselves of Atlanticist power for mutual benefit. Rather than merely protecting a liberal–democratic zone of peace across the Western hemisphere, Europe and Canada need to project the power of the transatlantic security community to deter Russia from using war to precipitate a multipolar world order in which it becomes a global player. This article draws on the metaphor of transatlantic relations as a triangle: with the US, Europe and Canada at its angles. Canada is in an existentially precarious position: a more autonomous Europe would make Canada even more dependent on the American hegemon, which would heighten Canada’s risk of being absorbed by the US. Although that outcome is not in Europe’s interest, Europe and Canada have been disengaging for decades. Reversing this trajectory would come at a significant military cost but would be a political gain that would be difficult to measure, resulting in cooperation on energy security, critical minerals, defence and defence in depth. Yet, to achieve this strategic counterbalance, Europe and Canada need to protect abiding security and political interests: to keep the US in Europe and to keep the Russians out. KeywordsCanada, Europe, EU, Euro-Atlantic community, US, NATO, Energy security, Defence, Defence in depth, Transatlantic relations, Structural realism Introduction ‘Europe and Canada are trusted friends and partners. Today this relationship is more critical than ever. I look forward to working with you to defend democracy, free and fair trade, and our shared values’ (von der Leyen 2025). The words of the president of the European Commission, on the swearing in of Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, identify Europe’s common priorities with the ‘most European of non-European countries’. The words reinforce a reinvigorated Schicksalsgemeinschaft, a German term that denotes a community with a common fate. After decades of distraction by ‘Asia-Pacific’ imaginaries, Europe and Canada are rediscovering the inevitability of their common fate, in the Euro-Atlantic community. Traditionally, the North Atlantic triangle has comprised an Atlanticist Anglosphere: the UK, the US and Canada. This article instead draws on an age-old metaphor coined by celebrated Canadian historian John Bartlet Brebner (1966): a North Atlantic triangle that reflects transatlantic strategic and political cultures. The angles of this triangle consist of the US, Canada and Europe writ large, as manifest in but not limited to the EU. Europe and Canada share a common strategic fate that makes them interdependent. Both stand to benefit from cultivating their relationship, while both stand to lose should Canada become even more dependent on the US. Canada’s strategic amnesia is manifest in its having forgotten the lesson of leveraging Europe to hedge against the uncertainties of US unilateralism. This is reminiscent of what Brebner called the ‘bookkeeper’s puzzle’: how can Canada best manage relations with both the UK and the US so as (a) to be able to invoke the assistance of the former against the latter’s political (and perhaps military) pressure, while at same time (b) ensuring that the British desire for an Anglo-American rapprochement does not result in any ‘sacrifice’ of Canadian interests? Historically, Canada had managed relations with the easternmost angle of the triangle, the UK, to assure its assistance against political (and possibly existential military) pressure from the US. At the same time, in the interests of its sovereignty, Canada wanted to ensure that any rapprochement with the UK would not end up sacrificing Canadian interests. An offshoot of the bookkeeper’s puzzle applies to attempts by Canada to involve its allies from NATO in an expanded triangle to counterbalance the US politically and economically (Haglund 2025). The bookkeeper’s puzzle thus reflects a real fear of abandonment: in Canada of being abandoned by Europe, and in Europe of being abandoned by the US. The key to the puzzle is for Canada and Europe to retrench and harness their interdependence. But that is easier said than done, due in part to free trade with the US, which has reinforced the shift of Canada’s organisational focus from east–west to north–south. The new North Atlantic triangle Since the founding of NATO in 1949, European countries and Canada have come to depend disproportionately on the world’s largest defence and intelligence complex for their security and have had the world’s largest economy as their primary trading partner. The US shored up its Atlantic and Pacific rims by design: a favourable trading relationship with the US allowed Europe to prosper, while the US guaranteed and underwrote Europe’s security against the Soviet threat. With the end of the Cold War, however, European allies opted to reduce their defence posture significantly. By contrast, since the end of the Cold War, the US has invested US$500 billion per year more than Europe in defence (at today’s prices)—which comes to almost US$20 trillion more than Europe over 35 years. This explains why Europe depends on US capability—especially in cyber, space and intelligence. The US feels that this came at its expense: 64% of European defence is still underwritten by the US (NATO 2025), up from 52% over the past decade, nothingstanding NATO members’ 2014 Wales summit pledge to spend more on defence. Why are 340 million Americans defending 450 million Europeans? Moreover, the US perceives those allies as benefiting from asymmetric trade relations, which the Trump administration considers to be to the detriment of the US. That is, European allies have failed to heed the first purpose of NATO which, in the infamous words of its first secretary general, Lord Ismay, is ‘to keep the Americans in Europe’ (Rodman 1995). To keep ‘the Russians out’ of Europe is the second purpose Lord Ismay sets out for NATO (Rodman 1995). In line with Article 5 of NATO’s founding charter (North Atlantic Treaty 1949, art. 5), allies rely on the US as the guarantor to deter Russia from its ambition of becoming a global player in a multipolar world order, which Russia is prepared to bring about by force. France and the UK notwithstanding, only the US has the nuclear triad and second-strike capability to ensure credible extended nuclear deterrence. However, two world wars and the Cold War have shown that Europe needs Canada for defence in depth. The usual connotation of this military strategy is to contain a bad actor that has breached a layer of defence by providing a second layer of defence. In this case, it refers to Canadian territory as being a safe and like-minded industrial hinterland for resources and an industrial base for Europe to rely on in times of war, as it did during the world wars. During these, Canada provided surge capacity and defence in depth from day one, long before the US ultimately joined in. In both cases, Canada’s reliable contribution changed the outcome of the war: the Second World War might have turned out quite differently had Canada not helped the UK hold down the island fort. Along with prevailing historical, ethno-cultural, political and economic ties, Canada and Europe share geostrategic interests: in the Arctic with the Nordic countries, and in the Atlantic rim with the UK, France, Spain and Portugal. Although Canada is disproportionately exposed to the consequences of US unilateralism, for Canada, leveraging European power to counterbalance the US is controversial (Haglund 1999). Canada’s changing demographics and trade relationships have oriented Canada away from Europe as the obvious ally and partner in safeguarding Canadian sovereignty. Conversely, Europe has an interest in using its power to assure Canada’s independence so as to limit the latter’s potential overexposure to the hegemonic impulses of the American empire: given the size of Canada’s economy and population, US leverage over Canadian natural, economic and human resources would increase America’s structural leverage, over Europe and the world, by about 10% over today’s American power. Such a situation would ensure its unrivalled status as the premier global superpower, which China alone could not match. In theory then, Canadian sovereignty depends on counterbalancing the US using European power. In practice, since the Second World War, both Canada and Europe have been drafting behind the US, deepening their economic and military reliance on the US, and shifting their strategic gaze away from a Euro-Atlantic community that they have taken for granted. Fixated on the US, both parties have seemingly suffered from amnesia about their bilateral transatlantic geostrategic interdependency. As US geostrategic interests increasingly diverge from those of the EU and Canada, and the US becomes more consumed with domestic (electoral) priorities and structural shifts in geopolitical gravity towards the Indo-Pacific, the relationship between Canada and Europe stands at a cross-roads. To counterbalance the power politics of an emboldened US, Russia and China, Europe and Canada need one another to preserve and uphold the liberal–democratic rules-based international order. This is especially true since the US’s pivot in geopolitical orientation, priorities and resource allocation towards the Indo-Pacific to disrupt an expansionist China that is intent on upending the prevailing international order. The US response to China has been to secure control over critical resources and geostrategic approaches that could render it vulnerable, while ensuring that it remains the world’s largest economy. On the one hand, eyeing natural resources and critical minerals in its proximate vicinity, notably Canada and Greenland, puts the US on a confrontational course with Europe and European interests. On the other, the US is ‘rebalancing’ away from Europe, the European neighbourhood and the Euro-Atlantic community as its priorities, and resources, shift to the Indo-Pacific. As a result, the US is expecting Europe to take on (far) greater responsibility for securing its own political interests and military backyard. In response, some European leaders, notably France, have continued to advocate for greater ‘strategic autonomy’ for Europe—an approach that drew the ire of the first Trump administration and is likely to aggravate Euro-Atlantic tensions—while others, notably Germany, have favoured chequebook diplomacy. This term describes the use of economic aid and investment as a means of attraction as part of soft-power projection (Leuprecht and Hamilton 2020). As the least powerful of the G7, Canada has neither luxury. Without European allies by its side, Canada runs an extreme risk of being left out in the geostrategic cold, with deleterious consequences for both Canada and the EU (Nossal 2023). Within the Euro-Atlantic community, the EU and Canada have not just suffered from mutual benign neglect. In the post–Cold War era, and especially with the advent of the Global War on Terror, Europe’s value to Canada has been declining steadily. Canada’s primary strategic relationship is naturally with the US, with which it shares a continent: co-located with the world’s largest economy, which a free trade agreement has made it ever more dependent on, Canada’s economy and security have become overly reliant on the US. The EU and the vast majority of its member states are also highly—arguably overly—dependent on the security and economic umbrella of the US. The supposed ‘peace dividend’ after the Cold War made NATO members even more dependent on the US. With so great an emphasis on their strategic relationships with the US, the perpendicular Canada–EU edge of the new North Atlantic triangle has never received much attention. What was a sin of omission, is now a sin of commission, by both parties. Friends, without benefits Reorienting Canada–Europe relations—as desirable as it may be—is a tall order. However intellectually appealing and geopolitically necessary, there are many obstacles. First, political leaders on both sides of the Atlantic have neither prioritised bilateral Euro–Canadian relations, nor really taken note of them, whether out of disinterest or because there was no pressing need: to date, 10 EU member countries still have not ratified the Canada–Europe Trade Agreement. In both the Old and the New World, long-term thinking in politics and society is a popular topic of discussion in the salons of the capital cities, but rarely reaches the offices of decision-makers and their advisers. In the end, the untapped potential for more vital, productive and politically successful relations between Canada and Europe is inversely proportional to the actual political will and capital that elites are willing to expend, especially relative to their interest in the US. Second, realignments in international relations require not only a strategic basis but also complementary apparatuses that are willing and able to action new strategic direction. This does not bode well for either Canada or the EU. The Canadian foreign service suffers from a vast backlog of reforms in terms of its structures, vision and mission, which is indicative of a broad decline in the efficiency, effectiveness and objectivity of the Canadian civil service (Savoie 2024) and the steady erosion of the ability of Canada’s federal government to manage civil society. Former Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Senate Reform resulted in the worst of both worlds: it further aggravated the struggle between Ottawa and the provinces over power and resources, and failed to generate greater capacity and interest in foreign and security policy in Canada’s upper chamber. The senators he appointed were preoccupied with domestic policy, and ideologically disinclined towards provincial rights. Recent foreign policy has resulted in six Canadian foreign ministers over the course of a decade; poor preparation and engagement by ministers who tout Canada’s ‘convening power’ but have little actual legitimacy to convene, let alone deliver; and two failed candidacies for a non-permanent seat on the UN Security Council. The foreign services of the EU and its member states, too, seem more preoccupied with themselves—notably with identity politics—than with playing a measurable, active role in shaping bilateral and multilateral external relations. In both the EU and Canada, the visibility and political effectiveness of foreign affairs instruments underperform: spending is unstructured and not optimised for strategic effect. Yet, both sides share a dogmatically defiant adherence to the legacy of a liberal rules-based international order. Indications of upheaval in the transatlantic relationship date back at least to President Obama’s ‘pivot’ to Asia. Realists posit the international system as anarchic, with states competing against one another and striving for survival. That world of power and interest-driven politics stands in increasingly stark contrast to Europe’s and Canada’s liberal institutionalist and values-driven approaches to the world. Third, for a realignment of the Canadian–European relationship at the political level, the impetus must not only originate from their respective civil societies, but also be accepted and actively legitimated in societies whose demographic composition is undergoing rapid change. Yet, legitimation deficits loom large. The EU’s view of the North American subcontinent remains wedded to the bilateral relationship with the US. At the same time, due to the slow implementation of the Canada–EU Trade Agreement, the potential for economic cooperation with EU institutions and member states remains largely unrealised, despite the fact that it has long been far easier for Canada and European allies to work together than for either to work with the US. For example, the extremely low international mobility rate of Canadian students, which is in the single digits, and the relatively few EU students who study in Canada, foreshadow a lack of future bilateral networks for emerging young leaders to tap into (European Commission 2020). Overly rigid certification standards in Canada for European university degrees impede broader student exchanges, labour mobility and more extensive knowledge transfer. Nevertheless, academic networks, that is, joint projects by non-governmental organisations from the EU dedicated to political cooperation with and in Canada, such as that fostered by the local EU delegation in Ottawa, portend positive developments: for example, the Jean Monnet Chairs and a centre that parlays European interest in Canadian universities, and the Europe Canada Network (EUCAnet) which facilitates transatlantic knowledge sharing among experts. Similarly, in the private sector, Canadian chief executives are in short supply in the EU, and potential candidates more often than not prefer to stay in their home country, the US or the Anglosphere, rather than invest in a transatlantic management career and the associated bilateral networks. The fourth obstacle is a direct result of the meagre transatlantic civil society: the prevailing images Canada and Europe have of one another one the one hand, and the failure to ‘bridge’ the transatlantic imaginary on the other. On the one side is Canada, the cosmopolitan, tolerant and fun subcontinent with bears, lakes, mountains and maple syrup, which—post-colonial realities notwithstanding—is considered by most Europeans to be the better North America and which, with its playful lightness, often manages to escape the critical gaze, and not only that of Europeans. On the other side is ‘Fortress’ Europe, with its sprawling bureaucracy, and myriad unmanageable regulations and trade barriers, which seemingly only feigns openness. Perception could not be further from reality. Foreign policy is driven by national interest, yet despite a trajectory of convergence among Euro–Canadian interests, especially of late, for the EU and European countries, Canada remains a low priority: Canada ranks about sixtieth in terms of priority across European states, well behind all the EU member states, and behind many other large and mid-sized powers around the world. Fifth, despite the intent to build closer ties, fundamentally different economic gravitational pulls on both sides persist: owing to bilateral free-trade agreements and globalisation, over the past 30 years, Canada has gradually become more dependent on the US, while the integrative benefits of the EU’s common market have reduced incentives for member states to invest in bilateral relations with Canada. Sobering foreign trade figures for the EU and European states with Canada hold little prospect of change in the foreseeable future: Canada barely cracks the top 10 of European export markets, whereas the EU is actually Canada’s second most important trading partner—but at barely a tenth of Canada’s trade with the US. Finally, if bilateral EU–Canada cooperation is to deepen, parliaments on both sides need to be more proactive and deliberate in transforming the relationship: while political executives, the European Commission and Canada’s government of the day set the agenda, it is the legislatures that legitimate and sustain it. The European Parliament maintains a permanent liaison office in Washington, DC as well as a European Public Law Organization in London and in every member state, but not in Ottawa. The Canada–Europe Parliamentary Association needs to fashion new formats to invigorate and promote relevant political projects among the Canadian, European and national parliaments, perhaps modelled on the robust array of activities undertaken by the NATO Parliamentary Assembly. Strategic friends, with benefits Its position in the new North Atlantic triangle makes Canada an attractive partner for Europe. Rich in natural resources and critical minerals, Canada has the potential to rank among the world’s most prosperous countries. Canada’s three largest export industries are oil, natural gas and agriculture, along with vast resources in potash (for fertiliser) and uranium (nuclear power). Were Canada to build more pipeline capacity to export hydrocarbons, it would have the potential to make Europe (much) more energy and critical-minerals secure, more competitive and prosperous by contributing to lower European energy prices, and less reliant on the US, the Middle East and Russia, especially for liquified natural gas. Canada has the third-largest oil reserves in the world, produces some of the cleanest natural gas and ranks among the world’s top five exporters of agri-food. Yet, Canada’s pipeline infrastructure is overly reliant on the US, which means Canada has to sell the bulk of its oil to the US at a 25% discount on world market prices. Bringing down European energy prices is the most important contribution Canada could be making in standing with Ukraine: Canada’s failure to export hydrocarbons to Europe keeps European energy prices high, which effectively amounts to Canada subsidising Russia’s war of aggression on Ukraine. Europe procures negligible amounts of Canadian oil via US facilities in the Gulf of Mexico, and Canada exports no liquified natural gas to Europe at all, despite Europe now procuring 120 billion cubic metres a year, about half of which comes from the US. Besides an abundance of natural resources and critical minerals, as well as cheap, clean electricity, Canada is also rich in human resources and other intangible assets: it has a concentration of data centres and artificial intelligence infrastructure, it is home to some of the best public universities in the world, it has a more diverse and younger demography than any European ally, and its immigration strategy has historically favoured high skillsets and education. As a result, Canada has long had the most tertiary-qualified workforce among OECD countries (OCED 2022). Although Canada shares common interests, institutions (such as the North American Aerospace Defence Command, NORAD), a continental identity and ideas with the US, as a Westminster parliamentary democracy, its values and political culture are closer to those of Europe than those of the US (Hataley and Leuprecht 2019). Moreover, as the only country that is a member of both the British Commonwealth and La Francophonie, Canada shares key cultural–linguistic attributes with both the UK and France: within the G7, Canada thus offers a counterweight to the Anglo-Saxon world. Europe also remains Canada’s second most important strategic partner, after the US. Owing to its experiences in the two world wars, Canada has a vested interest in Europe’s territorial integrity, political stability, economic prosperity and social harmony, with its like-minded European allies helping Canada to offset US unilateralist propensities. To that effect, NATO is a vital multilateral organisation for Canada; arguably, it is the most important, giving Canada a voice alongside 30 European allies and the US. Although it would be a mistake to equate counterbalancing the US with participation in NATO, Canada has a vested interest in sustaining and preserving NATO for the purpose of bandwagoning with European members to do just that (Jockel and Sokolsky 2021). For this reason, the Canadian Armed Forces has long been postured as an expeditionary organisation, with its primary orientation towards Europe. Via NATO’s external borders, Canada’s boundary with Russia stretches from its border with Alaska via a (disputed) Arctic maritime flank close to 1,000 km in length, to a 1,215 km land boundary in Northern, Central and Eastern Europe. Canada has thus sustained military commitments along much of the Russian flank. The pattern of Canada’s military deployments also shows that the country has vested interests in the Balkans, Europe’s southern flank, in the Mediterranean, the Middle East and North Africa. However, in recent decades, Canada has let its military atrophy to the point where it struggles to meet basic commitments—to NATO, to NORAD and to defending its own northern interests—let alone make new ones. Yet, the US pivot to the Indo-Pacific has created an opportunity for Canada to support US and European interests by backfilling some US capacity across Europe’s central, eastern and southern flanks, thus shoring up NATO, which is of benefit and interest to all member states. Were the EU to become a more independent defence actor, this would pose a serious risk to Canadian sovereignty and Canada’s standing in the world. In theory, Europe has the industrial base and financial capacity to provide for its own defence, security and survival. This, however, comes at a cost, for which European allies have thus far proven unable to muster the political will, although the European Commission’s $800 billion ReArm Europe plan holds promise that political will may be changing. The lack of will is cause for concern in the US, since Europe’s NATO allies have been sourcing about 60% of their arms from the US market. When France tried to take the initiative to achieve greater strategic autonomy for Europe during the first Trump presidency, Trump’s then NATO ambassador promptly dispatched an aggressive cease-and-desist letter (Leuprecht and Hamilton 2020). Although the US has resisted getting entangled in alliances since its first president, George Washington, NATO offers the US important levers. Nowhere in the world does the US invest proportionately less in defence for a higher rate of return. Canada and Europe are better positioned to add value to US military, political and strategic interests, than to try to go it alone individually. As Keohane (1988) famously observed, for the US, NATO is a very efficient and effective collective decision-making mechanism, gathering 30 European countries plus Canada—including some of the world’s top spenders on defence—the UK, Germany and France. Combined, the non-US NATO members spend about US$600 billion on defence (as compared to the US$877 billion by the US). The importance of NATO as an information-sharing and coordination mechanism has grown substantially since the formulation of NATO’s 2022 Strategic Concept, which brought key partners in the Indo-Pacific into the fold, including Australia, Japan, South Korea and New Zealand. Together, these allies and partners spent roughly US$1.7 trillion of a total global defence expenditure of about US$2.44 trillion in 2023. Of course, aggregate expenditures are an inchoate measure of military capability and commitment. While the US can necessarily exert greater pressure on any one country bilaterally, the benefits of NATO decision-making and coordination far outweigh the transaction costs for the US to do so bilaterally across three dozen countries. The reason the US spends as much as it does on its military is to preserve its freedom of action. Ultimately, being able to act unilaterally means never having to rely on others. Nonetheless, even though dispensable, allies are convenient to have as they also bring soft power, money and moral legitimacy. Greater European strategic autonomy is of little interest to the US, outside the NATO framework. The US does, however, have an interest in greater complementarity, capability and effectiveness within the organisation: it wants allies to do more together, on their own, provided they deconflict with the US. As the only other non-European NATO member country, Canada necessarily shares the transatlantic orientation of the US. Canada’s defence relations with Europe thus offer the US a mechanism to fall back on should the EU strive for greater strategic autonomy without coordinating with NATO and, therefore, with US interests. The lesson that the US drew from the Second World War was that, as a superpower, it has global interests. To this end, US unilateralism took on the trappings of a more multilateral approach to global affairs. The US collaborated with European partners and Canada to build the foundations of the post-war security, trade and monetary infrastructure: NATO, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, and the Bretton Woods Accord (which laid the foundations for the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank). This strategic collaboration brought North America and (Western) Europe historically unprecedented security, prosperity and stability. Over time, however, both the European members of NATO and Canada have forgotten that, multilateral trappings aside, the arrangement was born primarily out of US interest. In the aftermath of the two world wars, the US learned that territorial integrity, political stability, collective prosperity and social harmony in and of Europe were in the best interests of its aspirations as a global superpower. The claim to superpower status depended on a degree of control over Europe. Russia has long understood this; the US came to this realisation in the twentieth century; and for a China with global ambitions, this is a relatively recent realisation. For the US, NATO and extended nuclear deterrence are the means to this end; which is why Russia is intent on upending NATO, as both Russia and China aspire to be global players in a multipolar world, rather than regional players under a Pax Americana. Although Canada does not have nuclear arms, its position in North America necessarily means it has a role in assuring extended nuclear deterrence. Russia’s strategic approaches to North America, by way of the Arctic, pass through Canadian airspace. Canada’s gradual commitment to and spending on Arctic security and defence, including NORAD, therefore, are not just about homeland defence, but are also an investment in NATO by means of continental defence writ large (Leuprecht et al. 2018). North American continental defence assures uncompromised latitude for sovereign decision-making in Washington as well as Ottawa. An adversary that can threaten North America with intercontinental ballistic missiles or hypersonic missiles, for instance, could effectively curtail sovereign decision-making that reflects the best interests and legitimate democratic will of Americans or Canadians. That is, an adversary could overtly threaten Ottawa or Washington with an attack if confronted with a political choice that runs counter to its interests. This matters all the more since North American continental security is the bedrock of credible extended nuclear deterrence. An adversary that is able to call the nuclear triad, and especially the second-strike capability, into question would effectively undermine the US security umbrella that spans the Atlantic and Pacific rims. The states that currently rely on US extended deterrence would thus have an incentive to resort to nuclear proliferation to ensure their own survival. Since nuclear proliferation runs counter to European and Canadian interests in regional and global stability, this is one more reason for them to be more strategic about coordinating their contribution to the triangle. Ostensibly, the US does not need Canada to provide North American continental defence: the US has the capacity, capabilities and resources to go it alone. However, cutting Canada out of North American strategic defence would significantly reduce NATO’s leverage over collective defence. Europe and European allies would be left to deal with the US alone; Canada’s currency on the continent and across the Atlantic would be greatly diminished. The coincidence of NATO’s pivot to North American Arctic defence and Obama’s pivot to the Indo-Pacific is no accident. Certainly, there is an operational requirement to coordinate with NORAD on an integrated all-domain layered Arctic defence along NATO’s entire frontier with Russia. But this change also highlighted that NATO is, first and foremost, a political—not a military—alliance. Obama’s pivot necessarily meant less US attention paid to, input and interest in NATO; thus, it was in NATO’s best interest to show the flag in America’s backyard. NATO has not one but three pillars: Europe, North America and the transatlantic area. How we imagine the third matters for how the US imagines NATO’s role in the Atlantic: either, as popularised by Walter Lippman (1917), as an ‘ocean highway’ that by geography, culture and necessity connects two continental ‘communities’; or, in a triumph of politics over geography, as theorised by Alan Henrikson (1980), as a ‘lake’ and ‘inland sea’ that unifies rather than divides. Within the North Atlantic triangle, Canada can bridge the divide of a vast ocean, making it into a much more manageable inland sea. Canada’s geographic continental co-location with the US gives Europe limited, but strategically indispensable, leverage beyond Washington through which to influence the second and third pillars of NATO, using defence and diplomacy to counter US unilateralist proclivities. Conclusion For Canada to become even more (over)dependent on the US than it already is runs fundamentally counter to European interests. The EU has a vested interest in Canada maintaining sovereign control over its resources, political decision-making and defence. Conversely, the prospect of greater European strategic autonomy in defence outside of the NATO framework poses a potentially existential risk to Canada, rendering it more dependent on the US, and thus reducing its value to allies and partners and, by extension, its standing in the world. If this were to happen, Canada would face much higher transaction costs more akin to those of its partners in the Indo-Pacific, having to invest a lot more in foreign policy and defence for greatly diminished returns. Canadian sovereignty is a Trump card that the US is now playing to maximise its power and range of unilateral action in a world where its hegemony is under threat. Europe and Canada used to be discretionary friends. Now is the time to realise mutual benefits for strategic effect. Canada can support Europe’s interests in energy security, critical minerals, defence and defence in depth. In return, the EU can bolster Canadian political and economic sovereignty. Partnering with the EU is also the most efficient and effective way for Canada to gain greater independence from the US in defence and defence-industrial capacity. Greater, more autonomous military-industrial capacity would enable both Canada and the EU to build sustainable capabilities and commit to collective defence. Such a strategy would have a dual signalling purpose: of military deterrence to Russia, and of political and economic deterrence to the US. Canada and the EU should not just protect but actually promote their military, political and economic interests. Failing to be strategic about collective transatlantic security and the Euro-Atlantic community within the new North American triangle increases the risk that Canada and Europe will be abandoned by the US. Lord Ismay had a premonition should Europe and Canada fail to shape their future: Russia in Europe, America out, under German leadership. ORCID iDChristian Leuprecht https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9498-4749ReferencesBrebner J. B. (1966). North Atlantic triangle: The interplay of Canada, the United States and Great Britain. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart.European Commission. (2020). 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Abstract The paper considers the question of location in the development and governance of artificial intelligence in Africa. The discussion draws from ideas on locational advantage and the mix of factors that affect inequalities in AI development and how this influences the ability that countries have to shape AI norms, cultures and governance. It analyses policy documents and internet databases to highlight Africa’s place in AI development, the continent’s governance approach and the symbiotic relationship that explains the influence of advanced countries and tech corporations in the AI landscape. Based on this, it proposes the concept of the ‘politics of locationality’ to extend our understanding of how the power resident in AI systems is associated with their primary situatedness and how this reality, in turn, (re)produces imbalances and unequal opportunities for Africa in AI development and governance. It concludes with implications for Africa’s contribution to global AI cultures, design and governance at this time of pressing need for well-balanced AI policies. KeywordsAI governance, culture, ethics, inequality, locational advantage, politics of locationality Introduction The race for supremacy in AI development and governance has gathered pace among leading countries such as the US, European nations and China (Bradford, 2023). Many of the largest AI companies and models trace their origins to these countries and benefit from massive investments in computing, data and skills (Moorosi, 2024). By contrast, African countries mainly boast of AI startup ecosystems coordinated by technology hubs such as Kenya’s ‘Silicon Savannah’ (Eke et al., 2023) and African journalists have had to grapple with tools like ChatGPT, given the relevance of generative AI for media production (Gondwe, 2023). Although many of these experiences show Africa’s creative potential in the AI sector, as well as its growing market for AI technologies and tools (Okolo et al., 2023), there remain complex historical, cultural, political, legal, economic, labour and data factors that the continent faces in its drive towards AI development and governance. This mix of factors is a subject that scholars have considered to varying degrees (Muldoon and Wu, 2023; Png, 2022). I build on this by examining the question of locationality within that mix and how locationality helps to explain aspects of the symbiotic relationship between countries and platforms in shaping AI design and governance principles within a global context. My discussion sits at the intersection of critical media studies (Ott and Mack, 2014), digital geopolitics (Wong, 2021) and AI studies (Crawford, 2021), seeking to demonstrate why AI, understood as a political tool for constructing knowledge and generating maps of meaning, should be situated. This focus on situatedness further ties into studies on economic geography and locational advantage (Dunning, 1998; Iammarino and McCann, 2013), which explain why multinationals such as AI companies are more likely to choose certain locations as headquarters and how these locations are better placed to acquire greater leverage and power. It relates to the understanding that the location where a technology company is headquartered has considerable influence to shape that company’s decisions (Sargsyan, 2016), presupposing that advanced AI development confers locational advantage on the place where this development is primarily domiciled, making it a locus of power in shaping global AI ethics, norms and governance. This presupposition is what I interrogate by asking: How do issues around the location of AI development explain the impact that African countries have to shape AI design, cultures and governance in light of inequalities between advanced nations and the majority world? This question is crucial as it indicates which countries are better positioned as key definers of AI at a time when the design, norms, ethics, principles and governance of the technology are being concretised. It also leads to my argument on what I call the ‘politics of locationality’ as a concept to advance our understanding of how the primary situatedness of leading AI companies in advanced locations (such as the Global North) reveals inequalities in AI development and governance in the majority world. In this paper, advanced locations refer to the US, Europe and China – following Bradford’s (2023) description of them as the three digital empires, having the capacity not only to define the digital ecosystem in line with their cultures and priorities, but also shape the digital values of other countries that fall under their influence. The discussion that follows flows through a review of the literature, my methodology and findings, culminating in my argument on the politics of locationality. Locationality and the mix of factors in AI development Across the AI landscape, ethical principles are vital because they guide AI development, design and governance (Tidjon and Khomh, 2022). In Africa, some of the ethical and cultural values that researchers contend should guide AI development include ubuntu (communal humaneness), humanism and indigenous knowledge (Nayebare, 2019; Mhlambi and Tiribelli, 2023). Not enough of this has been realised, however, given that AI technologies on the continent remain a largely Western import (Eke et al., 2023). Nonetheless, home-grown African AI systems have been on the rise, evident in the creation of technology centres such as Kenya’s ‘Silicon Savannah’, Ethiopia’s ‘Sheba Valley’ and Nigeria’s ‘Yabacon Valley’ (Eke et al., 2023). The centres serve as ecosystems that provide leverage for AI startups that are supported by communities such as Data Science Nigeria and Deep Learning Indaba (Nuwer, 2024). Okolo et al. (2023) found that there are at least 102 of these startups in Africa. But they face challenges ranging from limited infrastructure for energy and computing-intensive technology and lack of expertise (Nuwer, 2024). These challenges presuppose that AI development on the continent is likely to lag behind global advancements – with implications for the influence that the continent has as a place from which AI norms, ethics and governance are shaped. The US remains a dominant player in shaping AI ethics and governance. Chan et al. (2021), for instance, observe that the US is predominant in the AI development space, in line with its economic and cultural dominance and China follows closely behind, pointing to a US-China tech war in digital geopolitics (Wong, 2021). China, in particular, has exported AI facial recognition and smart city technologies to Africa, serving as the continent’s largest foreign ICT investor (Lin, 2024), with increasing access to African datasets (Okolo et al., 2023) – a worrying trend. Also, investments in AI still concentrate in countries like the US and China, with only 1% of global venture capital flows into Africa (Moorosi, 2024). This means profits from AI development are typically reinvested in the leading countries, creating further disparities between them and the majority world (Chan et al., 2021). Although major tech companies (e.g. Google and Microsoft) have invested in Africa by establishing AI labs in African countries, Chan et al. (2021) note that it is common for staff working in these labs to be based in advanced countries. These major AI companies have also diversified their locational presence by outsourcing some operations through an international division of labour across Africa. But they tend to do so in exploitative ways such as hiring low-wage data annotators, highlighting the continent’s locational disadvantage (Ludec et al., 2023). What this points to is the relation of labour and capital, which further underscores Muldoon and Wu’s (2023) description of the global AI supply chain as colonial, since it is actualised through an international division of digital labour that extracts value from labour in the majority world for the benefit of Western technological companies. It also reinforces hegemonic knowledge production through Western values and knowledge that marginalise non-Western alternatives (Muldoon and Wu, 2023). This hegemonic knowledge production leads to questions on the role of the human in the machine, since AI is not based on abstract models, but is embedded in human agency and cultural values (Natale and Guzman, 2022). Additionally, this hegemonic knowledge production not only ties into discourses on power in critical media studies (Ott and Mack, 2014), but also on the relevance of AI for creative and cultural work (Lee, 2022) – as seen in the use of ChatGPT, which, African journalists say, is built on a poor and non-representative African corpus and perpetuates stereotypes of the continent (Gondwe, 2023). What the foregoing, therefore, indicates are the mix of historical, technological, economic, labour and cultural factors that underpin AI development and deployment in Africa’s locational context, with implications for governance outcomes. AI governance and digital regulation in Africa In terms of governance, state actors in Africa have drawn up policy and legal instruments at local levels and are only just taking part in global multistakeholder conversations. Examples of these multistakeholder fora include the AI Governance Alliance of the World Economic Forum (2025), where three African countries (Rwanda, South Africa and Kenya) are represented and the Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence (2025), where Senegal is the only African country. It is unclear what influence African countries wield in multistakeholder bodies like these, but the indication is that inclusion is usually performative and exists for ‘virtue signalling and promotional purposes’ (Png, 2022: para. 17). At continental and regional levels, Plantinga et al. (2024) observe that African countries have increasingly turned towards AI strategies, but without considering how feasible these are to implement and their suitability to local contexts. There are also data localisation laws, which stipulate that data be stored and processed in the location where they are generated, with restrictions on data transfers across borders (Giovane et al., 2023). These laws, which point to the geographical relevance of data, have been introduced by at least 16 African countries, including Mauritius, Lesotho and Ivory Coast; they are also present in legal instruments on data protection, financial transactions, cybersecurity and telecommunications in several countries across the continent (CIPESA, 2022). Locationality is therefore the underlying principle in data localisation, underscoring the importance of data for AI control and governance. Sargsyan (2016: 2224), for instance, notes: ‘countries that host intermediaries’ data centres and offices have more opportunities to exercise influence over companies’ decisions and claim jurisdiction over data stored in their territory.’ What is crucial here is the presence of data centres which is vital for AI production, and African countries face challenges in relation to data, since the continent’s data centre landscape is nascent although growing (DCByte, 2023). When it comes to enforcement, only a few countries have been successful in imposing local laws and claiming jurisdiction over data stored in data centres, the most successful being the US (Sargsyan, 2016: 2231). This underscores the difficulties of AI policy implementation that African governments face, since, as CIPESA (2022) notes, there is barely any evidence that data localisation laws have been enforced in Africa. Where implementation has been more practicable is in the imposition of internet taxes on users in countries like Guinea, Benin, Uganda and Zimbabwe (Bergére, 2019). The infrastructure platforms through which governments enforce the taxes are local Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and telecommunication providers (Bergére, 2019). The same process finds expression in the imposition of internet bans in Africa – enforcement targets usage disruption and is done through local ISPs (Parks and Thompson, 2020). African countries ordinarily enjoy a positive balance of power in comparison with local ISPs. Also, the fact that major tech and AI companies can be banned from operating or delivering services in any African country points to the power that the state has to impose controls as a means of last resort. Users can also deploy collective action against AI companies (Fratini and Musiani, 2024). All these highlight the diverse ways in which power and governance are contested at local levels but say little about the place that Africa holds in contributing to and shaping AI ethics, governance and worldviews in the global sense. If, as Sargsyan (2016) notes, the location where a technology company is headquartered has significant powers to influence the decisions of the technology company, then what does Africa’s record in AI development imply for its ability to shape AI design, ethics, cultures and governance? This question is what I aim to answer in interrogating the relevance of the politics of locationality for AI in Africa. Method To this end, I draw from a methodological approach informed by textual analysis of AI policy documents and critical analysis of internet databases containing the location associated with AI companies/models. For the AI policy documents, I focussed on three domains. The first domain concerned the AI policies of African countries, where I selected the AI Strategies of four countries: Mauritius (Mauritius AI Strategy, 2018), Egypt (Egypt AI Strategy, 2021), Rwanda (Rwandan National AI Policy, 2022) and Nigeria [draft] (Nigerian AI Strategy, 2024), representing South, North, East and West Africa respectively. I also reviewed the African Union’s (2024) AI Strategy. Mauritius, Egypt and Rwanda are particularly relevant because they are the first three countries to introduce AI strategies in Africa. I chose AI strategies because they comprise one of the major emphases for policymakers on the continent (Maslej et al., 2024). I analyse the strategies based on themes, which I developed after reviewing and coding the texts. The second domain included the AI policies of leading global players in AI: the US, EU and China. Here, my analysis aimed to ascertain whether these policies mandate AI firms to develop their technologies in line with principles and standards upheld by the leading countries. The third domain included the policies of some of the largest AI companies/models: OpenAI and Gemini (for the US), Darktrace (for the UK) and UBTECH and Qwen (for China). My aim was to examine whether these AI companies/models subject their policies and practices to the countries or places where they are headquartered. For the database searches, I accessed and reviewed the following to ascertain the location of AI companies globally: Datamation (see Jungco, 2024), AI Directory (2024) and the Companies Market Capitalisation (2024). I also drew from sources such as Epoch AI (2024), the Emerging Technology Observatory’s (2024) AI Country Activity Tracker and the AI Index Report (Maslej et al., 2024). Overall, my goal was to assess Africa’s place in AI development in comparison with the leading countries in AI before considering the leverage that locationality affords to nations when it comes to AI design, ethics and governance – the underlying premise for the politics of locationality. Locational advantage and AI development in Africa While acknowledging the mix of factors that comprise AI development, my findings focus on locationality by considering the number of AI companies headquartered in Africa and elsewhere. Here, I found that most AI companies are headquartered in advanced countries, with many of the largest AI companies being in the US. These are companies that have significant capitalisation as listed on the Companies Market Cap to scale globally and invest in AI infrastructure and models that fundamentally impact societies. Jungco’s (2024) review shows that the overwhelming majority (80%) of these companies are based in the US (81 out of 101 companies). The closest to this was the UK, which had eight companies out of 101. India and Canada had three each; China and Germany had two each; and Israel and Hong Kong had one each. The same is true for data compiled by AI Directory (2024) and the Companies Market Capitalisation (2024). I compiled the three listings (Jungco, 2024; AI Directory and the Companies Market Cap) and removed duplicates. The combined list comprised 234 of the largest AI companies (see Table 1), ranging from Apple valued at $3.3 trillion to FR8Tech valued at $2.1 million. The outcome shows that at 73%, the US is the undoubted leader. It is followed by India (5.98%), the UK (5.56%), China (2.99%) and Canada (2.56%). There is no African country on the list.   There is a similar outcome for data on notable AI models, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Alibaba’s Qwen and Meta’s Llama. Table 2 shows that, when isolating for AI models owned by organisations or entities that come from only one country, two-thirds (67.7%) of these notable AI models are traceable to the US. Again, no other country comes close; the closest countries are the UK, China, Canada and Germany. Maslej et al. (2024), in the AI Index, also show that foundation AI models, which are the basis for generative AI, are far more prevalent in the US. Again, there are no entries for Africa.   If Africa does not serve as a headquarter for the largest AI companies or models, what then can be said about AI startups? To answer this, I consulted the 2024 AI Country Activity Tracker, which presents data on the number of approved AI patents based on country locations, including patents for AI startups. The data, presented in Table 3, show that Africa is only ahead of the Middle East; even at this, Africa accounts for only 0.000006% or 157 of the 250,224 AI patents captured in the tracker. And only three African countries account for the continent’s figures: South Africa (139 patents), Morocco (17 patents) and Kenya (1 patent). Although this figure of 157 is slightly more than the 102 startups that Okolo et al. (2023) provided, the conclusions are similar: Africa has some way to go in making up for AI development in the future.   All these show that although Africa provides labour and data for AI companies globally and is poised to be a significant market as internet connectivity spreads (Access Partnership, 2024), it barely serves as a headquarter for AI companies, particularly the largest ones. This underscores Africa’s nascent standing in AI development and suggests that African countries will likely be constrained in their ability to shape wider AI ethics, cultures and governance. It perhaps explains why no African country has passed AI legislation into law (although some attempts are underway), with focus instead on AI task forces, national policies and strategies (Maslej et al., 2024). I turn next to the analysis of these strategies to examine the policy approach to AI development and governance in Africa. Analysing AI strategies in Africa My analysis of the AI strategies/policies of Mauritius, Egypt, Rwanda, Nigeria and the AU shows that they coalesce around four main themes: AI adoption for economic growth, AI partnership and collaboration, improving AI ethics and governance and strengthening local AI capacity. The focus on AI for economic growth is understandable, given that AI’s potential for economic transformation is a major attraction. This focus, which is present in all the strategies, highlights how AI can enhance economic development in various sectors (see in particular, the Mauritian Strategy). But more important, in the context of my discussion, are the inequalities in international cooperation and multistakeholder governance that the strategies point towards. To establish this, I refer to Pillar Two of the Nigerian AI Strategy, which underscores the need for partnership and collaboration among local and international stakeholders to leverage AI expertise and resources. The Rwandan AI Policy also recommends international partnerships and collaboration in AI development. But collaborations, especially with international private actors, highlight the need to evaluate where the major partners come from. These partners can collaborate with African countries and invest in AI, but they still operate primarily by rules set in their home countries, even if they also subscribe to laws in subsidiary countries (I establish this point in the next section). The exception would be collaboration within the continent, as can be found in the Egyptian and AU Strategies. The third theme, which focusses on ethics and governance, acknowledges the risks of AI and the need to mitigate them. It considers the importance of having AI principles such as fairness, transparency and accountability (see the Nigerian Strategy). The AU Strategy also mentions the need to guard against bias and risks to African values, indigenous knowledge and cultural heritage. This is connected to the AU’s Agenda 2063, which has a media and culture mandate to support inclusive and ethical AI through values such as ubuntu. But the plan to address these risks, for the most part, points to multistakeholder governance. The Egyptian Strategy, for instance, seeks to ‘actively contribute to global efforts and playing an active role in AI in different international fora’ (Section 5.1). Rwanda’s Policy also intends to ‘actively contribute to shaping responsible AI principles and practices in international platforms’ (Key Policy Recommendation 14). Likewise, the AU Strategy promotes a ‘multi-tiered governance approach’ (Section 2.4.1). They highlight a move towards greater inclusivity in international governance – hence the use of the word ‘actively’ in many of the strategies. My point, however, is that no matter how ‘actively’ African countries intend to influence AI cooperation, ethics and governance, there is a need to first reckon with Africa’s standing in AI development. Policymakers on the continent seem to have recognised this reality, and it is noticeable in their focus on strengthening local AI capacity. The AU Strategy, for instance, notes that Africa faces challenges around lack of computing platforms, limited data for training AI models and a scarce supply of AI skills, observing that, as of 2023, all the world’s supercomputers are located in only 30 countries. The Nigerian Strategy also recognises the need to build ‘affordable and localised infrastructure foundations and the compute capacity’ (Section 1.4.2) by making high-performance computing available. In Rwanda and Egypt, there is emphasis on AI training in schools. Evident here is a recognition that the continent lags behind in AI development, although it has a growing AI startup ecosystem and an unsaturated market for AI. It underscores the need to interrogate AI development, the locational advantages and disadvantages it represents and its links to governance inequalities. I argue that this should be a major consideration in Africa, based on what I describe as the politics of locationality. The politics of locationality Having established the foundational basis for my argument, I now define the politics of locationality as the way in which the power resident in Big Tech and AI systems is associated with their primary situatedness in places of advanced technological and AI development and how this underlying reality, in turn, (re)produces imbalances and unequal opportunities for AI development and governance faced by countries in the majority world, particularly Africa. The politics of locationality highlights the mix of advantages that countries such as the US, China and those in Europe where the largest AI companies are headquartered have. By contrast, African countries, despite advances that have been made in the AI startup ecosystem and state policy interventions, suffer from a range of disadvantages in locational, political, economic, cultural, data, labour and historical spheres. Addressing this mix of disadvantages is what the continent needs to become a location of influence from which the values, ethics and governance that circumscribe AI can be shaped. To expand on my argument, I refer to the AI policies of some of the largest companies and the guiding principles for AI that leading tech countries have drafted. Take OpenAI for instance. The OpenAI (2024) Terms of Use specify that dispute resolution between the company and users anywhere in the world would be coordinated by National Arbitration and Mediation, headquartered in New York. The law that governs the arbitration is the US Federal Arbitration Act. It adds that, ‘California law will govern these Terms’ and ‘claims arising out of or relating to these Terms will be brought exclusively in the federal or state courts of San Francisco, California’ (see Governing Law Section). This is not surprising, given that OpenAI is headquartered in San Francisco. Also, for Gemini (2024), owned by Google, the governing law of its User Agreement is the laws of New York, and the Agreement is seen as a ‘contract wholly entered into and wholly performed within the State of New York’ (see Governing Law Section). I found a similar pattern in the UK and China. In the UK, Darktrace (2024), an AI cybersecurity firm, notes that the governing law of its Master Services Agreement is the laws of England and Wales, except if the customer is located in the US, in which case the laws of California apply. In China, Section VII of the Terms of Use of UBTECH (2023), an AI robotics firm, states: ‘The establishment, effectiveness, performance, interpretation and dispute resolution of this [user] agreement are subject to the laws of the People’s Republic of China (excluding Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan).’ The same goes for Alibaba’s Qwen (2023), which is covered by the Alibaba Cloud International Website Terms of Use, the governing law of which is that of Singapore, where Alibaba has its office in the Asia Pacific. Hence, I note that AI companies uphold the laws of the countries where they are headquartered, and they subject the governance of their technologies to these laws. AI companies have also come under sustained pressure to develop rules according to the values, ethics and standards of their host nations, thanks, in part, to the dictates of digital geopolitics and the competition for AI supremacy. The US, for instance, had the Biden Administration’s Executive Order on Safe, Secure and Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence (US Executive Order, 2023), through which it sought to promote an AI market that emphasises US innovation and leadership on AI (Section 2(h)) and the need to encourage international partners to support the voluntary commitments of US AI companies (Section 11(a)(ii)). But these voluntary commitments are underpinned by the need for US leadership and ‘to ensure that artificial intelligence is aligned with values shared by all Americans’ (proposed National AI Commission Act (2023), Section 3(g)(1)). The Biden Executive Order was replaced in January 2025 by the Trump AI Executive Order, aptly named, ‘Removing Barriers to American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence.’ All these underscore that a key intention of US policy is that the design of AI mirrors America’s geopolitical leadership, cultural norms, ethics and jurisprudence. A similar line of argument applies to Europe and China. In Europe, the first clause of the European Union (2024) AI Act says its purpose is to lay ‘a uniform legal framework’ for AI development and deployment ‘in accordance with Union values’ (Section 1) and it supports the ‘European human-centric approach to AI and being a global leader’ in AI development (Section 8). In China, there is the Generative AI Measures released in August 2023. The regulation includes a stipulation that generative AI technologies should not produce content that incite the ‘subversion of national sovereignty or the overturn of the socialist system’ (Henshall, 2023: para. 2). The same ethos is evident in China’s 2023 Management of Deep Synthesis of Internet information Services enacted by the Cyberspace Administration of China (2022). It mandates that in developing products such as AI, companies must abide by Chinese laws, correct political direction and value orientation. This was clearly evident in the January 2025 roll out of DeepSeek, a China-based AI assistant, which when asked about Tiananmen Square, refused to answer, saying it follows ‘ethical guidelines’ and added: ‘I respect the laws and cultural contexts in which I operate’ (author’s conversation with DeepSeek). It goes to show that expansive or restrictive design and deployment of AI technologies are subject to the value system prevalent in their originating countries. Hence, the politics of locationality sustains the different visions that leading tech countries have of AI in their battle for supremacy – visions that are not necessarily inclusive of African perspectives even though they find expression on the continent through pervasive deployment and usage. Conclusion In this paper, I have examined the importance of the location of AI companies and, by so doing, introduced the politics of locationality as a concept to extend our understanding and explain the standing that nations have in AI development and how this translates to the influence they wield in AI governance. My discussion showed that although Africa has a growing AI startup ecosystem, a burgeoning user market base and state influence in policymaking, the continent still faces a mix of disadvantages in historical, technological, political, legal, economic, labour and data spheres. This mix reveals the locational disadvantage that confronts Africa as a place from which AI ethics, cultures and governance can be shaped in the global sense. It relates to Hassan’s (2023) point on the ‘lack of African AI innovations that are rooted in the local context but [have] the potential to compete at the global scale’ (p. 1430). What I found was that AI companies that have global scale and presence are headquartered mainly in leading tech countries (the US, China and European nations) and have subjected themselves to the governing laws of these countries. Conversely, the laws and policies of leading tech countries mandate that these companies, among other things, embed the respective country’s ethos, values and cultures into AI systems. The link between AI systems and cultural values as outlined in this paper, therefore, points to the connection between media and cultural studies and AI. In particular, the paper highlights the importance of considering how AI is produced and shaped by cultural understandings, and how AI further projects, shapes and extends culture. It suggests the need for greater research emphasis on the connections between media, AI and culture, given that AI represents the intersection of human labour, machine learning, infrastructure (e.g. data centres), mineral resources (e.g. lithium), media inputs (vast troves of data: information, texts, pictures, videos, maps, and codes) and classification systems that all combine to transform AI models into mechanics of knowledge construction (Crawford, 2021). The outcome are mediated outputs (e.g. AI responses to prompts and automated decisions) – outputs that simultaneously represent and transform culture, even as they are shaped by it. Equally crucial and more important, in the context of this paper, is the need to consider the locationality of it all. By this I mean the globalised and complex interaction of locations in AI development and governance that potentially determines whose culture is elevated and whose culture is progressively silenced in a relationship defined by hegemony and inequality. Key to understanding this hegemony-inequality mix is the principle of locational advantage, which Iammarino and McCann (2013) describe as a two-way relationship between multinationals and their locational headquarters, noting that just as location is becoming increasingly vital for multinationals, so also are multinationals progressively more important for location (i.e. cities or countries). It underscores my argument on the politics of locationality, which shows that just as large AI firms need locations, such as the US or China, that have the right mix of advantages to serve as headquarters, so also do leading tech countries need and use these firms in setting the cultural and governance paradigm for AI technologies. This structural makeup reflects the imbalances in AI development, explaining why AI governance systems exist within institutional-heterogenous regimes that reproduce Global North dominance (Png, 2022). Addressing these imbalances is what African countries, supported by the AU, should focus on, and there are initial signs that African countries are starting to do this (as seen in the AI strategies). However, a bolder and more robust approach to AI development that is attuned to Africa’s unique sociopolitical context and economic evolution is needed to confront the imbalances tied to the politics of locationality. By so doing, Africa can be positioned to assume locational advantage, with important consequences for inclusive AI and the contribution of global majority countries to the cultures and values embedded in AI systems and the ethics and frameworks by which they are governed. AcknowledgmentsThe author extends appreciation to the editors and reviewers for their helpful and constructive comments, and also to the participants at the 2023 International Symposium on AI Cultures at the University of Turin for their feedback – all of which strengthened the article.Declaration of conflicting interestsThe author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.FundingThe author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Leverhulme Trust as part of an Early Career Fellowship. 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Abstract Recent changes in US foreign policy and strategic posture have forced Europe to think about meeting its security needs without US support. One issue that requires a particular focus is the question of how to deter and defend against Russia in a conventional war. This article attempts a high-level assessment of European military capability and considers whether existing military doctrine is adequate. It argues that Europe should maintain its focus on NATO’s manoeuvrist mode of war fighting and identifies key capability gaps that need to be filled for (a) a coalition of the willing and (b) Europe as a whole to be able to fight in this way. It cautions against an unduly defensive, attritional method of fighting, based on conscript armies, as playing to Russia’s strengths instead of our own. Introduction War has come back to Europe and so has the need to think about how to fight it. Between 24 February 2022 and 21 January 2024, we put the need to rethink our defence to one side, because the Biden administration allowed us the luxury of being able to repurpose Cold War institutions (most obviously NATO), deterrence and habits to support Ukraine and dissuade Russia from another overt attack. This was a mixed blessing, because while it saved us the need to put our societies and economies on a war footing, it also blinded us to the need to build something new. The old system was not the best to contend with Russia’s aggression. While the US had only half an eye on Europe—with the rest of its focus on China—Western Europeans continued to free-ride on American resources. Neither Germany’s Zeitenwende, nor the aspersion cast by Emanuel Macron that ‘NATO is brain-dead’ (Macron 2019) translated into larger defence budgets, increased orders for ammunition, the conversion of civilian manufacturing to military use or the running of plants in shifts to replenish stockpiles. Only the Nordics, Baltics and Poland really moved to a war footing, and even their restructuring suffered from a desire, exposed as wishful thinking by Trump’s victory in November 2024, to keep the US involved. Now, with the US being led by an unstable pro-Russian Donald Trump and an anti-European JD Vance, the choice has been made for us. Steps are already being taken to prepare Europe’s industrial base, whether it is the creation of a European defence commissioner, Germany’s removal of its debt brake or initiatives such as the EU’s proposed Security Action for Europe (SAFE) financing instrument. But our political elite also needs to educate itself beyond these industrial and economic matters. War has once again become an essential part of what every responsible political leader needs to know. As it had been until 1945, if not 1989, some understanding of the military arts has, unfortunately, again become indispensable for European statespeople. This article will start by outlining certain concepts to help inform our debate about how we defend ourselves against Russia. It will relate them to the state of our military equipment, and pose questions about how we should fight with what we have, and how we should make more of what we need to fight in the way that gives us the maximum advantage over Russia. It will ask what elements of the existing NATO way of war should be kept, and which ought to be replaced, as a new European way of war—a European ‘doctrine’—is developed. And it will identify the key gaps in capability that need to be filled to apply such a doctrine in two scenarios: one where most of Europe confronts Russia (excluding neutrals, such as Ireland or Austria; potentially hostile states, such as Hungary and Slovakia; and Greece and Turkey, which deploy military resources to deter a conflict between themselves), and another where the burden is taken up by a coalition of the willing. This coalition is drawn up narrowly to constitute the Nordic–Baltic Eight (NB8),1 the UK, Poland and Ukraine. Other countries, for example, Czechia and the Netherlands, would currently be considered part of this coalition, but their contributions have, conservatively, been excluded for the purpose of this assessment. This article does not assume that the European military effort should replicate the American one (for the cost of replication, see Wolff 2025). Instead it seeks to assess how Europe would deter and defeat Russia in ways that exploit our advantages against the Russian military. We do not need to replace the Americans one-for-one, but nor should we replicate Russia’s relatively low-technology and low-skill warfare. That would be to give up the strongest advantages our free and technologically advanced societies provide. Centre of gravity The first concept we need to outline is the ‘centre of gravity’: the phrase, whose application to war we owe to Clausewitz (1918, 270), refers to that feature of a belligerent that will cause it to change its behaviour when subject to pressure. The aim of military strategy, he argued, was not necessarily the destruction of the enemy’s forces, still less their population, but the application of force to their centre of gravity in order to achieve your war aim. With this in view, the most important question for European military planners is, where is Putin’s, or Russia’s, centre of gravity? This question will occupy our strategists’ minds for the foreseeable future: its answer includes determining whether it is Putin, or some other group in the Russian elite, such as the military, energy producers or business oligarchs, on whom pressure should be applied, and if so what pressure is required. Under what conditions would Putin sue for peace, or be replaced by someone who would, if Russia extended its war to conventional military aggression against Europe? Only once these conditions have been identified, is it then relevant to ask how they might be brought about. This consideration of centre of gravity begs an important question: how is Russia to be deterred from attacking Europe? How can sufficiently severe consequences be imposed on Russia, bearing in mind that the loss of almost 400 aircraft (Minfin.com.ua 2025) and several thousand tanks, and close to a million men killed and wounded have not been enough to push Putin to retreat from Ukraine? It is, however, necessary to pose this question, because there is a temptation to avoid it by focusing on ‘deterrence by denial’. This idea would be to defend ourselves in the manner in which the Chinese are thought to defend themselves against the US: by preventing US forces from landing in China by attacking its large, expensive ships. This does not apply to the Russian case for two reasons: first, Russia is willing to sacrifice men and equipment in human-wave assaults; the only equipment it seems to have decided to preserve is its air force. Second, Russia has a land border with Europe, so it does not need to attack using small numbers of vulnerable ships. Denial is extremely difficult against human-wave attacks, as US forces found in Korea, and Iraqis found in the Iran–Iraq war when revolutionary Iran employed them. (See Meyer zum Felde 2024 for a deterrence by denial–focused approach.) Order of battle A second concept is the ‘order of battle’: what are the forces arranged on either side of a conflict and how do they measure up to each other? As well as military units, it is worthwhile also considering the broader elements of societal strength—economic, political and cultural—that each side has, and how these contribute to the war effort. For example, our open societies leave us more vulnerable to hybrid attacks and disinformation, but on the other hand supply great strength and flexibility. Democratic societies do not wait for the government to tell them what to do, but organise social defence in ways that dictatorships find more difficult; the market economy possesses enormous flexibility that centrally planned systems do not; and an entrepreneurial can-do culture can also produce superior military performance through the concept of ‘mission command’ (see below). But the first question is who would be fighting? Sometimes pieces are written as if it would only be Britain and France confronting Russia (Barker et al. 2025), but borders have shifted since the Cold War: Eastern Europe, including the highly capable Polish and Finnish militaries, as well, of course, as Europe’s strongest army, Ukraine’s, would be arrayed against Moscow, not operating under its orders. Europe’s total military-age population is considerably greater than Russia’s. If Austria, Hungary, Ireland and Slovakia are excluded for political reasons, and Greece and Turkey as well, because they will wish to preserve resources in case a conflict breaks out between them, ‘Europe’ has 89.5 million military-age men and 88 million military-age women, compared to Russia’s 31 million military-age men and 33 million military-age women.2 The question of how such forces are recruited and generated, particularly in the economically more successful parts of Europe, is of course relevant, but the sheer capacity to provide sufficient personnel is not in doubt. It is useful to consider the matter of mobilisation. Russia was in transition from a conscript to a professional army when it launched its attack on Ukraine. It still mobilises 160,000 men per year, mostly to fill rearguard positions and free up front-line deployment for professional troops. This is equivalent to 17% of the annual cohort of young men.3 Europe (as defined above) could generate similar forces without much difficulty. A one-year cohort of the European population includes 2.7 million men and 2.5 million women. Even if it limited itself to calling up men, it would only need to recruit 6% of the population. Such a number would be feasible with a voluntary reserve service programme, and would not require universal conscription. Considering the countries most at risk of Russian aggression, and most likely to need to defend against it, presents a starker picture. The NB8 plus Poland and the UK between them have an annual cohort of 7.7 million men and 7.3 million women. If the male population of these countries took part in military service at the same rate as Russians, this would generate 130,000 personnel, requiring an additional 30,000 female personnel to match Russian numbers. This would require a female reserve participation rate of 4%, which is an achievable figure. For example, at least 25% of Norway’s annual conscription quota comprises women. Despite a recent surge in calls to reintroduce universal military service in Europe, this is not necessarily advisable in all countries. Training a large cohort of conscripts takes resources away from exercises and advanced training for professional officers. While it may be justified for small nations on the front line, it is not the best use of resources for larger countries. The required manpower needs can in most cases be met by a selective reserve system. European stocks of platforms (as distinct from ammunition stocks, which are dangerously low) are also not outrageously out of balance with the requirement for a mission against Russia, though this is partly due to Ukraine’s destruction of Russian equipment since 2022. The following (table 1) compares stocks of fighter jets, main battle tanks and artillery pieces across several groups of European countries (some including Ukraine) versus Russia. This analysis is necessarily somewhat crude, as it excludes infantry fighting vehicles, mortars and other equipment. It also completely sets aside analysis of naval forces. Its fighter aircraft figures comprise fourth-generation fighters, old fighters (predating the fourth generation or the Warsaw Pact) and F35s.4 Finally, these figures do not take future production (either European or Russian) or the evolution of land and air drones into account (International Institute for Strategic Studies 2024).   Source: International Institute for Strategic Studies (2024). Note: This table compares the main platforms (fighter jets, main battle tanks and artillery pieces, including rocket artillery) that various European countries have at their disposal. Countries are placed in different categories and then compared against Russia. Each category also appears in two variants: one including Ukraine, and one that does not include Ukrainian forces. The ‘NB8+ coalition’ is the NB8 plus the UK and Poland. Non-neutral Europe means EU members plus the UK and Norway, but minus Ireland, Austria, Hungary and Slovakia. Using this table one can see, for example, that the NB8+ coalition has 542 fewer fighter jets at its disposal than Russia but essentially the same number of main battle tanks. With the exception of the scenario in which only the NB8+ coalition and Ukraine face off against Russia, Europe currently has approximately the required numbers of platforms to resist a Russian attack (bearing in mind a deficit in artillery pieces if Ukraine is not included). This leads to the following conclusions: • Ukraine needs to be considered an integral part of European defence against Russia, and its defeat would allow Russia to focus its forces on EU territory.• The coalition faces a notable air-power shortage in confronting Russia. While it has enough planes to deter Russian use of its aerospace, it does not have sufficient equipment to attempt to establish air superiority.• At an overall European level the priority should not be buying new platforms. Platform acquisition should be part of any rearmament plan, but priorities should be determined by the specific needs of a campaign against Russia, with importance given to filling the key gaps needed to conduct such a campaign. Platforms, ammunition and network-centric warfare The analysis above is only a first approximation of military strength. It considers only equipment and mobilisation potential, rather than force generation, and concentrates on land and air forces, setting aside the navy because a Euro-Russian conventional war would largely be fought on land. (The air force calculations do include naval aviation equipment, however, as these could be brought to bear). It also deals only with the main ‘platforms’: main battle tanks, fighter planes and artillery pieces, ignoring armoured personnel carriers and infantry fighting vehicles, engineering and support equipment, and, most importantly, ammunition. Simply replicating Russian numbers of platforms without considering communications, software and unmanned systems risks equipping ourselves to fight the last war (Tallis 2025). The spectrum that runs between a platform, which serves to move weapons systems into a place where they can be fired, and a piece of ammunition, fired from a platform, is another dimension of analysis. For example, during the Second World War the distinction was clear: an artillery shell was ammunition; an artillery piece a platform. But how should one categorise a cruise missile, which could be launched from a plane (so it appears to be ammunition launched from a platform), or directly from land, in which case it could arguably be a platform on its own? What is the difference between a cruise missile and a long-range drone? The war in Ukraine has seen the rapid development of short-range single-use drones that behave, in some ways, like super-intelligent artillery shells; and actual shells have incorporated guidance systems, and even propulsion systems, so that they have become what are known as ‘loitering munitions’. The point here is that strength is not just measured by platforms, but by the things that can be delivered to the battlefield with them (or independently of them), and an assessment of military strength needs to include an understanding of stocks of ammunition, the ability to replenish it and to fire it at where it is needed. This brings us to the idea of networks. War has always given the advantage to the side that could bring force to bear in a coordinated fashion while itself avoiding being the target of a coordinated enemy attack. The latest iteration of this is known as ‘network-centric warfare’, which, in its ideal form, means that every participant in the battle, from planes and ships all the way down to individual soldiers and drones can observe the ‘battlespace’ and communicate information about it to the right layer of command. Using this information, commanders, assisted by artificial intelligence, can decide where ‘effect’ is to be concentrated to bring about maximum damage to the enemy, more quickly than it can cause damage. This capability is not necessarily confined to the most expensive high-tech armies. Ukraine has shown how off-the-shelf electronic components can be added to existing systems to improve them (for example, to allow its artillery to concentrate fire on a single target despite the artillery systems themselves being dispersed). Precision If in the popular imagination precision weapons are used mainly to reduce collateral damage (and this was indeed their main use during the campaigns against terrorist groups in the first two decades of this century), in high-intensity war their advantage is that they conserve resources and time. Even if an individual precision artillery shell is more expensive, it is more useful to be able to use one or two guided shells to hit a target than 30 or 40 unguided ones. Not only is less ammunition used, but fewer troops are needed to operate it, and the wear and tear on the artillery pieces is considerably less. Precision results in greater ‘effect’ from the inputs to the process. Though sometimes presented as its opposite, precision should be understood as a way of delivering ‘mass’; this concept, also from Clausewitz (1918, 98), refers to the quantity of force that can be brought to bear against an enemy at a particular time. It matters because fighting is not a continuous linear process where the amount of force one applies has an effect in proportion to its quantity—in war having more power at one place at the right time means you will win the battle and the enemy will be weaker for the next one. The slightly stronger force can often inflict damage on the weaker one in a way that is disproportionate to the difference in their strength. To take a simple example for the purposes of illustration, suppose we start with 100 tanks, and so do they. Thanks to our commander’s skill we are able to concentrate 50 of our tanks against 40 of theirs. We lose 10 tanks, they lose 35. Now we have 90 tanks, they have 65. In this example our ability to get those extra 10 tanks in the right place has given us an advantage that can be pressed further in the next battle. It is these facts that underpin the approach that NATO, and the West more broadly, has applied to fighting. Although Western democracies have been able, due to their superior economic systems and technological advantage, to outproduce their enemies, winning a war of attrition is not where they consider their advantage to come from. Instead they emphasise their speed of movement and thought, and their ability to confuse their enemies, tricking them into dividing or misdirecting their forces, and then pouncing at the right moment; this is the ‘manoeuvrist’ creed of war, in which we fight smart and overcome the enemy by more than brute force. It is important not to draw the distinction between attrition and manoeuvre too crudely. Manoeuvre warfare is easier when you have more and better kit, and your leaders are informed by better intelligence obtained through technological as well as human sources. It also takes advantage of the characteristics of free societies. Manoeuvre warfare is strengthened by ‘mission command’: the notion that subordinate officers are given the ability to decide exactly how to fulfil their orders. This gives Western militaries a flexibility that is absent from the armies of dictatorships, in which such freedom is rarely granted,5 but of course this depends on officers and soldiers being sufficiently well-trained, and possessing a good enough level of general education, to operate independently. It is the best way for us, as free and well-educated peoples, to fight—it is not necessarily the best for everyone. A manoeuvrist force, is, as the name suggests, on the move. It is constantly advancing, communicating its changing position, attempting to bypass and confuse the enemy. It operates at a high tempo in order to overwhelm the enemy mentally as well as physically, and the ability to sustain this type of fighting informs training, equipment command and intelligence: ‘the key to winning battles is to have greater forces at the key location than does the enemy. The trick is to outwit the enemy and thus out-concentrate him at the right time’ (Warden 1998, 79). This matters for learning the right lessons from Ukraine’s fight for survival. Ukraine has only been able to master some of the lessons of manoeuvrist warfare. It has been hampered by its limited capacity in the air, which slows it down and makes it hard to break Russian lines except with artillery and long-range fire (such as the famous HIMARS rockets). It is in transition from Soviet- to Western-style command. But it has also shown tremendous capacity to innovate, particularly in its use of drones to hold a defensive line. Ukraine’s tremendous first-person drone capacity allows it to stop Russian attacks while risking far fewer troops (drone operators work behind the lines, where they are at much lower risk than the men in the trenches) and even compensate for artillery.6 These principles feed into NATO’s existing doctrine (NATO 2022), which involves identifying the enemy’s centre of gravity, achieving air superiority to deliver firepower against its command and control nodes, and then overcoming its disoriented forces at speed. It relies on synthesising intelligence through networks of sensors and exploiting the information they provide to deploy massed precision against them. Such operations, however, require certain capabilities that depend on equipment and structures provided mostly by the US. The first of these is NATO’s command structure. NATO’s armies have a single command structure that conducts exercises together. At the top is the Supreme Allied Commander (American) and the Deputy Supreme Allied Commander (European). American units are integrated throughout the force structure. European forces will need to plan, exercise and be ready to fight without these American elements—it is not merely a matter of detaching them. The second is the intelligence and planning capability to carry out those war plans and adapt to the evolving battle. These integrate intelligence gathered from sensors, satellites and human sources, and artificial intelligence is increasingly involved in its processing as extremely large amounts of data must be handled quickly and secretly. As well as certain sensors (satellites and aircraft), the US’s processing software is also vital here, though Europeans have equivalent capabilities at reduced scale. Third are the sensors, software and missiles needed to suppress enemy air defences (SEAD). SEAD missions are a prerequisite for establishing air superiority against adversaries that possess sophisticated air defence systems, such as Russia. Indeed, the failure of Russia’s SEAD missions in Ukraine, and Ukraine’s ability to deter Russian aviation, may also indicate that an effective air defence is easier to mount than had been thought.7 Europe, however, currently lacks the ability to make the latest generation of anti-radiation missiles (which target enemy radar) essential to the success of SEAD. India’s poor performance against Pakistan, where it appears to have attempted to conduct deep strikes against its rival without conducting SEAD, underlines the importance of these capabilities (Economist 2025). It will take some years to develop them, and this needs to be prioritised. A full discussion of the requirements for successful SEAD against Russia can be found in Bronk and Watling (2025). Finally there is the question of Russia’s nuclear threats. Though the UK and France possess ‘strategic’ nuclear arsenals, these, because they threaten the complete destruction of the world, can only credibly deter the most extreme sort of attack. Russia and the US both have low-yield or ‘tactical’ nuclear weapons, and Russia has regularly threatened to use them. These threats would significantly complicate elements of a European campaign to deter Russia, which might involve actions such as seizing Kaliningrad or advancing from Finland towards the environs of St Petersburg. Europe needs the ability to restrict Russia to conventional weapons in such circumstances. Though such deterrence does not have to be supplied using tactical nuclear weapons of our own (Hoffmann 2021), these would be the most straightforward instrument for this purpose. As the UK’s nuclear weapons systems are submarine launched (and use American missiles), France’s arsenal would have to be expanded to provide this capability, and be able to be deployed closer to the front as, for example, Donald Tusk has hinted.8 Conclusion and recommendations Fighting without the Americans does not necessarily mean we need to replace exactly what they used to supply. Instead we need to understand the mission required, which is to deter Russia by credibly showing how Russian forces would be defeated, in the field, should Putin attempt to attack us. In an ideal world this credible threat would cause the military to remove Putin should he attempt further adventurism against Europe, but we cannot rely on such an eventuality. This means that we have to think carefully about how we would fight and sustain political support for a major European war. The good news is that provided that the bulk of Europe is willing to contribute, we have the resources and equipment needed to defeat Russia. Upgrades, in particular in SEAD capability and tactical nuclear weapons, need to be made, but they are not out of reach. In addition, we have a solid basis in military doctrine that can be used to organise a campaign that takes advantage of our military cultures and technological lead. The less good news is that the countries that can be guaranteed to make up a ‘coalition of the willing’ (the NB8 plus Poland, the UK and Ukraine) would currently struggle to mount an offensive campaign on their own. They would, in particular, struggle to field a sufficiently large air force to win air superiority over Russia, though they have enough aircraft to deny Russia air superiority of its own. This would limit their ability to put manoeuvrist doctrine into practice, and, notwithstanding advances in drone warfare pioneered by the Ukrainians, could cause them to fall back to static defence and attritional warfare, as illustrated by the proposed Baltic Defence Line. Such an approach would stretch the human resources of a coalition of the willing extremely thin. It is perhaps ironic that Europe as a whole could win a war of attrition against Russia, but it also would not have to, as it could prosecute a campaign of manoeuvre against the Russian military and Putin’s state. Accordingly my recommendations are laid out below. Europe should focus on what it needs to defeat Russia, rather than what would be required to replace the American commitment to NATO. Nevertheless, it should not, as a whole, revert to using conscript-based armies designed to fight a war of attrition against Russia. These give up the greatest advantages of technologically advanced free societies and would leave us fighting the kind of war Russia would want us to fight. Certain small front-line states might need to make different calculations. Universal military service might be required so that they can, in extremis, mount a defensive campaign—for example, if Finland and the Baltic states were required to fight on their own without support from European allies. This highly extreme scenario is sufficiently unlikely that it should not form the basis of other countries’ military planning. The core ‘coalition of the willing’—the Nordic countries, the Baltic states, plus Poland, the UK and Ukraine—could defend themselves against Russia, and with some effort would be able to conduct an offensive campaign to bring about Russian defeat. They would need, however, to make important improvements to their defence. The coalition would require an integrated command structure and a programme of exercises. The expansion of the UK-led Joint Expeditionary Force and the UK’s command headquarters would be a suitable nucleus for such capability. The coalition would face a manpower deficit compared to Russia, and matching Russian mobilised reserve levels would be a challenge. The coalition could, however, match Russian mobilisation levels with a Swedish- or Norwegian-style selective military service programme for young men and women (it could achieve sufficient coverage for defensive purposes by recruiting 16% of men and 6% of women each year). The coalition is also severely short of aircraft with which to pursue an air superiority campaign against Russia. Though it would fare better than Ukraine on its own, increasing the size of the coalition’s air forces must be a priority, and the risk of over-dependence on the F35 needs to be considered. Though ‘kill switches’ are a myth, a sovereign spare parts supply chain (as Finland is creating) and sovereign intelligence software (as used by Israel) are required to reduce the risk of US unreliability. The coalition would also need to consider replacing the F35’s intelligence and command capabilities with replacements that could operate on European aircraft, such as the Gripen or Rafale. The lack of stealth capability would also hamper the coalition’s air forces until a sixth-generation fighter could be developed. Europe as a whole has forces of the necessary scale to conduct operations against Russia. Its shortfalls in ammunition production and inefficiencies due to the diversity of its equipment have been covered elsewhere. Some inefficiency is likely to persist as long as Europe remains a relatively decentralised continent, but it is likely to be better to bear the extra cost now, than waste time with the ambitious political integration projects required to eliminate it quickly. Europe as a whole would need to develop its own command structure. At this level it may be possible to repurpose NATO’s Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) using the Berlin Plus process, though care would need to be taken to avoid a potentially hostile US, as well as unfriendly NATO members, such as Hungary, blocking operations. As urgent as ammunition production (a category that includes missiles as well as artillery) is the manufacture of equipment to conduct SEAD campaigns. Reviving European capacity to produce anti-radiation missiles and in intelligence capability to uncover targets for them should be a matter of the highest priority. The final priority area is the expansion of Europe’s tactical nuclear capability. Though the French and British strategic arsenals can provide the ultimate deterrence against Russia, tactical, or low-yield, weapons are needed to deter Russia from threatening European forces with its tactical nuclear weapons. As the British programme is not suitable, these would have to be based on the French programme, and questions related to how this expansion would be paid for, and how tactical nuclear use would be authorised, would need to be addressed. Footnotes1. Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia.2. These estimates are based on Eurostat data for the EU member states, the Office for National Statistics population projections for the UK and the most recent available data for Russia, which is based on UN data not currently available but which have been reported on Wikipedia. The Russian data are from 2012, so these overestimate Russian demographic strength slightly. The military age calculation aggregates the standard five-year demographic groups between 20 and 49. Obviously a military may mobilise younger and older people as well, but the comparison remains valid.3. In this case, by taking the 10-year sample of 15–24-year-olds and dividing it by 10 to smooth out fluctuations. Again, because of declining Russian demographics (even without accounting for losses due to the war), this is likely to be an underestimate of the proportion mobilised (because the total number of 18-year-old men is lower than the statistics indicate).4. F35s are easily the most advanced fighter available, and the only one reliably able to penetrate Russian air defences before suppression of enemy air defence missions have been accomplished. The deterioration in relations with the US, however, poses questions about the ongoing reliability of the supply chain associated with them. Though ‘kill-switches’ are a myth, European countries will need to maintain their own spare parts supply and software upgrade path if they are to gain the most out of the aircraft in the long run. Finland, for example, is establishing its own sovereign spare parts supply, and Israel has a sovereign software intelligence solution on its F35s.5. An exception was the Wehrmacht, which inherited mission command from the Prussian Army; however, its generals found themselves micromanaged by Hitler, which (fortunately) affected their performance.6. These small drones are very different from those deployed in the early stages of the war such as the Bayraktar TB2 or Western drones such as the Reaper. They are much closer to ammunition than platforms, and (in good weather, at least) replace artillery or close air support.7. It could also indicate that Russian aviation is not as good as had been thought, but it would be dangerous to plan on that assumption.8. Author’s conversation with a Polish official who wished to remain anonymous.ReferencesBarker K., Smialek J., Erlanger S. (2025). Europe prepares to face Russia as Trump’s America steps back. New York Times, 24 February.Bronk J., Watling J. (2025). Rebalancing joint fires to deter Russia. Royal United Services Institute Occasional Paper. London, 15 April. https://static.rusi.org/rebalancing-european-joint-fires-to-deter-russia.pdf. Accessed 15 April 2025.Clausewitz K. von. (1918). On War. Trans. Graham J. J. (London: K. Paul Trench, Trubner & Co.)Dalaaker A. (2017). Statement by Norway on gender equality in the military – universal conscription. Organisation for Co-operation and Security in Europe. 8 March. https://www.osce.org/files/f/documents/b/9/304861.pdf. Accessed 9 April 2025.Economist. (2025). Chinese weapons gave Pakistan a new edge against India. 15 May. https://www.economist.com/asia/2025/05/15/chinese-weapons-gave-pakistan-a-new-edge-against-india. Accessed 16 May 2025.Hackett M., Nagl J. (2024). A long hard year. Russia–Ukraine war lessons learned 2023. Parameters, 54(3), 41–52.Hoffmann F. (2021). Strategic non-nuclear weapons and strategic stability – promoting trust through technical understanding. Fondation pour la recherche strategique. https://frstrategie.org/sites/default/files/documents/programmes/Programme TNP - P5/2021/202103.pdf. Accessed 9 April 2025.International Institute for Strategic Studies. (2024). The military balance. London: Routledge.Meyer zum Felde R. (2024). Kann sich Europa konventionell gegen eine militärische Bedrohung durch Russland behaupten? Sirius, 8(3), 267–83.Minfin.com.ua. (2025). Casualties of the Russian troops in Ukraine. Updated daily. https://index.minfin.com.ua/en/russian-invading/casualties/. Accessed 5 March 2025.Nagl J., Crombe K. (2024). A call to action: Lessons from Ukraine for the future force. Carlisle, PA: US Army War College Press.NATO. (2022). Allied joint doctrine. December. https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/allied-joint-publication-ajp. Accessed 9 April 2025.Tallis B. (2025). Emerging defence: Offset and competitive strategies for Europe. Democratic Strategy Initiative. https://www.democratic-strategy.net/_files/ugd/dcfff6_ca54854b6dc7499e829a5fa4d7b01b74.pdf. Accessed 16 March 2025.Warden J. (1998). The air campaign: Planning for combat. Washington, DC: National Defence University Press.Wolff G., Burlikov A. (2025). Defending Europe without the US: First estimates of what is needed. Bruegel, 21 February. https://www.bruegel.org/analysis/defending-europe-without-us-first-estimates-what-needed. Accessed 9 April 2025.

Abstract We examine the roles of Gold and Bitcoin as a hedge, a safe haven, and a diversifier against the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic and the Ukraine War. Using a rolling window estimation of the dynamic conditional correlation (DCC)-based regression, we present a novel approach to examine the time-varying safe haven, hedge, and diversifier properties of Gold and Bitcoin for equities portfolios. This article uses daily returns of Gold, Bitcoin, S&P500, CAC 40, and NSE 50 from January 3, 2018, to October 15, 2022. Our results show that Gold is a better safe haven than the two, while Bitcoin exhibits weak properties as safe haven. Bitcoin can, however, be used as a diversifier and hedge. This study offers policy suggestions to investors to diversify their holdings during uncertain times. Introduction Financial markets and the diversity of financial products have risen in both volume and value, creating financial risk and establishing the demand for a safe haven for investors. The global financial markets have faced several blows in recent years. From the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) to the outbreak of the pandemic and uncertainty regarding economic policy measures of governments and central banks, the financial markets including equity markets around the world were faced with severe meltdowns. This similar behavior was observed in other markets including equity and commodity markets, resulting in overall uncertainty. In this scenario, the investors normally flock toward the safe-haven assets to protect their investment. In normal situations, investors seek to diversify or hedge their assets to protect their portfolios. However, the financial markets are negatively impacted when there are global uncertainties. Diversification and hedging methods fail to safeguard investors’ portfolios during instability because almost all sectors and assets are negatively affected (Hasan et al., 2021). As a result, investors typically look for safe-haven investments to safeguard their portfolios under extreme conditions (Ceylan, 2022). Baur and Lucey (2010) provide the following definitions of hedge, diversifier, and safe haven: Hedge: An asset that, on average, has no correlation or a negative correlation with another asset or portfolio. On average, a strict hedge has a (strictly) negative correlation with another asset or portfolio.Diversifier: An asset that, on average, has a positive correlation (but not perfect correlation) with another asset or portfolio. Safe haven: This is the asset that in times of market stress or volatility becomes uncorrelated or negatively associated with other assets or a portfolio. As was previously indicated, the significant market turbulence caused by a sharp decline in consumer spending, coupled with insufficient hedging opportunities, was a common feature of all markets during these times (Yousaf et al., 2022). Nakamoto (2008) suggested a remedy by introducing Bitcoin, a “digital currency,” as an alternative to traditional fiduciary currencies (Paule-Vianez et al., 2020). Bitcoin often described as “Digital Gold” has shown greater resilience during periods of crises and has highlighted the potential safe haven and hedging property against uncertainties (Mokni, 2021). According to Dyhrberg (2016), the GFC has eased the emergence of Bitcoin thereby strengthening its popularity. Bouri et al. (2017) in their study indicate that Bitcoin has been viewed as a shelter from global uncertainties caused by conventional banking and economic systems. Recent research has found that Bitcoin is a weak safe haven, particularly in periods of market uncertainty like the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) crisis (Conlon & McGee, 2020; Nagy & Benedek, 2021; Shahzad et al., 2019; Syuhada et al., 2022). In contrast to these findings, a study by Yan et al. (2022) indicates that it can function as a strong safe haven in favorable economic times and with low-risk aversion. Ustaoglu (2022) also supports the strong safe-haven characteristic of Bitcoin against most emerging stock market indices during the COVID-19 period. Umar et al. (2023) assert that Bitcoin and Gold are not reliable safe-havens. Singh et al. (2024) in their study reveal that Bitcoin is an effective hedge for investments in Nifty-50, Sensex, GBP–INR, and JPY–INR, at the same time a good diversifier for Gold. The study suggests that investors can incorporate Bitcoin in their portfolios as a good hedge against market volatility in equities and commodities markets. During the COVID-19 epidemic, Barbu et al. (2022) investigated if Ethereum and Bitcoin could serve as a short-term safe haven or diversifier against stock indices and bonds. The outcomes are consistent with the research conducted by Snene Manzli et al. (2024). Both act as hybrid roles for stock market returns, diversifiers for sustainable stock market indices, and safe havens for bond markets. Notably, Bhuiyan et al. (2023) found that Bitcoin provides relatively better diversification opportunities than Gold during times of crisis. To reduce risks, Bitcoin has demonstrated a strong potential to operate as a buffer against global uncertainty and may be a useful hedging tool in addition to Gold and similar assets (Baur & Lucey, 2010; Bouri et al., 2017; Capie et al., 2005; Dyhrberg, 2015). According to Huang et al. (2021), its independence from monetary policies and minimal association with conventional financial assets allow it to have a safe-haven quality. Bitcoins have a substantial speed advantage over other assets since they are traded at high and constant frequencies with no days when trading is closed (Selmi et al., 2018). Additionally, it has been demonstrated that the average monthly volatility of Bitcoin is higher than that of Gold or a group of international currencies expressed in US dollars; nevertheless, the lowest monthly volatility of Bitcoin is lower than the maximum monthly volatility of Gold and other foreign currencies (Dwyer, 2015). Leverage effects are also evident in Bitcoin returns, which show lower volatilities in high return periods and higher volatilities in low return times (Bouri et al., 2017; Liu et al., 2017). According to recent research, Bitcoins can be used to hedge S&P 500 stocks, which increases the likelihood that institutional and retail investors will build secure portfolios (Okorie, 2020). Bitcoin demonstrates strong hedging capabilities and can complement Gold in minimizing specific market risks (Baur & Lucey, 2010). Its high-frequency and continuous trading further enrich the range of available hedging tools (Dyhrberg, 2016). Moreover, Bitcoin spot and futures markets exhibit similarities to traditional financial markets. In the post-COVID-19 period, Zhang et al. (2021) found that Bitcoin futures outperform Gold futures.Gold, silver, palladium, and platinum were among the most common precious metals utilized as safe-haven investments. Gold is one such asset that is used extensively (Salisu et al., 2021). Their study tested the safe-haven property of Gold against the downside risk of portfolios during the pandemic. Empirical results have also shown that Gold functions as a safe haven for only 15 trading days, meaning that holding Gold for longer than this period would result in losses to investors. This explains why investors buy Gold on days of negative returns and sell it when market prospects turn positive and volatility decreases (Baur & Lucey, 2010). In their study, Kumar et al. (2023) tried to analyse the trends in volume throughout futures contracts and investigate the connection between open interest, volume, and price for bullion and base metal futures in India. Liu et al. (2016) in their study found that there is no negative association between Gold and the US stock market during times of extremely low or high volatility. Because of this, it is not a strong safe haven for the US stock market (Hood & Malik, 2013). Post-COVID-19, studies have provided mixed evidence on the safe-haven properties of Gold (Bouri et al., 2020; Cheema et al., 2022; Ji et al., 2020). According to Kumar and Padakandla (2022), Gold continuously demonstrates safe-haven qualities for all markets, except the NSE, both in the short and long term. During the COVID-19 episode, Gold’s effectiveness as a hedge and safe-haven instrument has been impacted (Akhtaruzzaman et al., 2021). Al-Nassar (2024) conducted a study on the hedge effectiveness of Gold and found that it is a strong hedge in the long run. Bhattacharjee et al. (2023) in their paper examined the symmetrical and asymmetrical linkage between Gold price levels and the Indian stock market returns by employing linear autoregressive distributed lag and nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag models. The results exhibit that the Indian stock market returns and Gold prices are cointegrated. According to the most recent study by Kaczmarek et al. (2022), Gold has no potential as a safe haven, despite some studies on the COVID-19 pandemic showing contradictory results. The co-movements of Bitcoin and the Chinese stock market have also normalized as a result of this epidemic (Belhassine & Karamti, 2021). Widjaja and Havidz (2023) verified that Gold was a safe haven asset during the COVID-19 pandemic, confirming the Gold’s safe-haven characteristic. As previously pointed out, investors value safe-haven investments in times of risk. Investors panic at these times when asset prices fall and move from less liquid (risky) securities to more liquid (safe) ones, such as cash, Gold, and government bonds. An asset must be bought and sold rapidly, at a known price, and for a reasonably modest cost to be considered truly safe (Smales, 2019). Therefore, we need to properly re-examine the safe-haven qualities of Gold and Bitcoin due to the mixed evidences regarding their safe-haven qualities and the impact of COVID-19 and the war in Ukraine on financial markets. This work contributes to and deviates from the body of existing literature in the following ways. We propose a novel approach in this work to evaluate an asset’s time-varying safe haven, hedge, and diversifier characteristics. This research examines the safe haven, hedging, and diversifying qualities of Gold and Bitcoin against the equity indices; S&P 500, CAC 40, and NSE 50. Through the use of rolling window estimation, we extend the methodology of Ratner and Chiu (2013) by estimating the aforementioned properties of the assets. Comparing rolling window estimation to other conventional techniques, the former will provide a more accurate representation of an asset’s time-varying feature. This study explores the conventional asset Gold’s time-varying safe haven, hedging, and diversifying qualities during crises like the COVID-19 pandemic and the conflict in Ukraine. We use Bitcoin, an unconventional safe-haven asset, for comparison. Data and Methodology We use the daily returns of three major equity indices; S&P500, CAC 40, and NSE 50 from January 3, 2018, to October 15, 2022. The equity indices were selected to represent three large and diverse markets namely the United States, France, and India in terms of geography and economic development. We assess safe-haven assets using the daily returns of Gold and Bitcoin over the same time. Equity data was collected from Yahoo Finance, Bitcoin data from coinmarketcap.com, and Gold data from the World Gold Council website. Engle (2002) developed the DCC (Dynamic Conditional Correlation)-GARCH model, which is frequently used to assess contagion amid pandemic uncertainty or crises. Time-varying variations in the conditional correlation of asset pairings can be captured using the DCC-GARCH model. Through employing this model, we can analyse the dynamic behavior of volatility spillovers. Engle’s (2002) DCC-GARCH model contains two phases; 1. Univariate GARCH model estimation2. Estimation of time-varying conditional correlation. For its explanation, mathematical characteristics, and theoretical development, see here [insert the next link in “the word here” https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/09711023251322578] Results and Discussion The outcomes of the parameters under the DCC-GARCH model for each of the asset pairs selected for the investigation are shown in Table 1.   First, we look at the dynamical conditional correlation coefficient, ρ.The rho value is negative and insignificant for NSE 50/Gold, NSE 50 /BTC, S&P500/Gold, and S&P500/BTC indicating a negative and insignificant correlation between these asset pairs, showing Gold and Bitcoin as potential hedges and safe havens. The fact that ρ is negative and significant for CAC 40/Gold suggests that Gold can be a safe haven against CAC 40 swings. The asset pair CAC/BTC, on the other hand, has possible diversifier behavior with ρ being positive but statistically insignificant. Next, we examine the behavior of the DCC-GARCH parameters; α and β. We find that αDCC is statistically insignificant for all the asset pairs, while βDCC is statistically significant for all asset pairs. βDCC quantifies the persistence feature of the correlation and the extent of the impact of volatility spillover in a particular market’s volatility dynamics. A higher βDCC value implies that a major part of the volatility dynamics can be explained by the respective market’s own past volatility. For instance, the NSE 50/Gold’s βDCC value of 0.971 shows that there is a high degree of volatility spillover between these two assets, with about 97% of market volatility being explained by the assets’ own historical values and the remainder coming from spillover. Thus, we see that the volatility spillover is highly persistent (~0.8) for all the asset pairs except NSE 50/BTC. The results above show that the nature of the dynamic correlation between the stock markets, Bitcoin and Gold is largely negative, pointing toward the possibility of Gold and Bitcoin being hedge/safe haven. However, a detailed analysis is needed to confirm the same by employing rolling window analysis, and we present the results in the forthcoming section. We present the rolling window results for S&P500 first. We present the regression results for Gold in Figure 1 and Bitcoin in Figure 2   Figure 1. Rolling Window Regression Results for S&P500 and Gold.Note: Areas shaded under factor 1 represent significant regression coefficients. In Figure 1, we examine the behavior of β0 (intercept term), β1, β2, and β3 (partial correlation coefficients). The intercept term β0 will give an idea about whether the asset is behaving as a diversifier or hedge. Here, the intercept term shows significance most of the time. However, during 2018, the intercept was negative and significant, showing that it could serve as a hedge during geopolitical tensions and volatilities in the global stock market. However, during the early stages of COVID-19, we show that the intercept is negative and showing statistical significance, suggesting that Gold could serve as a hedge during the initial shocks of the pandemic. These findings are contrary to the results in the study by Tarchella et al. (2024) where they found hold as a good diversifier. Later, we find the intercept to be positive and significant, indicating that Gold could act as a potential diversifier. But during the Russia-Ukraine War, Gold exhibited hedge ability again. Looking into the behavior of β1, which is the partial correlation coefficient for the tenth percentile of return distribution shows negative and insignificant during 2018. Later, it was again negative and significant during the initial phases of COVID-19, and then negative in the aftermath, indicating that Gold could act as a weak safe haven during the COVID-19 pandemic. Gold could serve as a strong safe haven for the SP500 against volatility in the markets brought on by the war in Ukraine, as we see the coefficient to be negative and large during this time. From β2 and β3, the partial correlation coefficients of the fifth and first percentile, respectively, show that Gold possesses weak safe haven properties during COVID-19 and strong safe haven behavior during the Ukraine crisis. Next, we examine the characteristics of Bitcoin as a hedge/diversifier/safe haven against the S&P500 returns. We present the results in Figure 2.   Figure 2. Rolling Window Regression Results for S&P500 and Bitcoin.Note: Areas shaded under factor 1 represent significant regression coefficients. Like in the previous case, we begin by analysing the behavior of the intercept coefficient, which is β0. As mentioned earlier the intercept term will give a clear picture of the asset’s hedging and diversifier property. In the period 2018–2019, the intercept term is positive but insignificant. This could be due to the large volatility in Bitcoin price movements during the period. It continues to be minimal (but positive) and insignificant during 2019–2020, indicating toward weak diversification possibility. Post-COVID-19 period, the coefficient shows the significance and positive value, displaying the diversification potential. We see that the coefficient remains positive throughout the analysis, confirming Bitcoin’s potential as a diversifier. Looking into the behavior of β1 (the partial correlation coefficient at tenth percentile), it is positive but insignificant during 2018. The coefficient is having negative sign and showing statistical significance in 2019, suggesting that Bitcoin could be a good safe haven in that year. This year was characterized by a long list of corporate scandals, uncertainties around Brexit, and tensions in global trade. We can observe that throughout the COVID-19 period, the coefficient is showing negative sign and negligible during the March 2020 market meltdown, suggesting inadequate safe-haven qualities. However, Bitcoin will regain its safe-haven property in the coming periods, as the coefficient is negative and significant in the coming months. The coefficient is negative and shows statistical significance during the Ukrainian crisis, suggesting strong safe-haven property. Only during the Ukrainian crisis could Bitcoin serve as a safe haven, according to the behavior of β2, which displays the partial correlation coefficient at the fifth percentile. Bitcoin was a weak safe haven during COVID-19 and the Ukrainian crisis, according to β3, the partial correlation coefficient for the first percentile (coefficient negative and insignificant). According to the overall findings, Gold is a stronger safe haven against the S&P 500’s swings. This result is consistent with the previous studies of Triki and Maatoug (2021), Shakil et al. (2018), Będowska-Sójka and Kliber (2021), Drake (2022), and Ghazali et al. (2020), etc. The same analysis was conducted for the CAC 40 and the NSE 50; the full analysis can be found here [insert the next link in “the word here” https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/09711023251322578]. However, it is important to highlight the respective results: In general, we may say that Gold has weak safe-haven properties considering CAC40. We can conclude that Bitcoin’s safe-haven qualities for CAC40 are weak. We can say that Gold showed weak safe-haven characteristics during the Ukraine crisis and good safe-haven characteristics for the NSE50 during COVID-19. We may say that Bitcoin exhibits weak safe haven, but strong hedging abilities to NSE50. Concluding Remarks In this study, we suggested a new method to evaluate an asset’s time-varying hedge, diversifier, and safe-haven characteristics. We propose a rolling window estimation of the DCC-based regression of Ratner and Chiu (2013). Based on this, we estimate the conventional asset’s time-varying safe haven, hedging, and diversifying properties during crises like the COVID-19 pandemic and the conflict in Ukraine. For comparison purposes, we include Bitcoin, a nonconventional safe-haven asset. We evaluate Gold and Bitcoin’s safe haven, hedging, and diversifier properties to the S&P 500, CAC 40, and NSE 50 variations. We use a rolling window of length 60 to estimate the regression. From the results, we find that Gold can be considered as a better safe haven against the fluctuations of the S&P 500. In the case of CAC 40, Gold and Bitcoin have weak safe-haven properties. While Bitcoin demonstrated strong safe-haven characteristics during the Ukraine crisis, Gold exhibited strong safe-haven characteristics during COVID-19 for the NSE 50. Overall, the findings indicate that Gold is the better safe haven. This outcome is consistent with earlier research (Będowska-Sójka & Kliber, 2021; Drake, 2022; Ghazali et al., 2020; Shakil et al., 2018; Triki & Maatoug, 2021). When it comes to Bitcoin, its safe-haven feature is weak. Bitcoin, however, works well as a diversifier and hedge. Therefore, from a policy perspective, investing in safe-haven instruments is crucial to lower the risks associated with asset ownership. Policymakers aiming to enhance the stability of financial portfolios might encourage institutional investors and other market players to incorporate Gold into their asset allocations. Gold’s strong safe-haven qualities, proven across various market conditions, make it a reliable choice. Gold’s performance during crises like COVID-19 highlights its potential to mitigate systemic risks effectively. Further, Bitcoin could also play a complementary role as a hedge and diversifier, especially during periods of significant volatility such as the Ukraine crisis. While Bitcoin’s safe-haven characteristics are relatively weaker, its inclusion in a diversified portfolio offers notable value and hence it should not be overlooked. Further, policymakers may consider how crucial it is to monitor dynamic correlations and periodically rebalance portfolios to account for shifts in the safe haven and hedging characteristics of certain assets. Such measures could help reduce the risks of over-reliance on a single asset type and create more resilient portfolios that can better withstand global economic shocks. For future research, studies can be conducted on the estimation of the rolling window with different widths. This is important to understand how the safe-haven property changes across different holding periods. Further, more equity markets would be included to account for the differences in market capitalization and index constituents. This study can be extended by testing these properties for multi-asset portfolios as well. We intend to take up this study in these directions in the future. Data Availability StatementNot applicable.Declaration of Conflicting InterestsThe authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.FundingThe authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.ReferencesAkhtaruzzaman M., Boubaker S., Lucey B. M., & Sensoy A. (2021). Is gold a hedge or a safe-haven asset in the COVID-19 crisis? Economic Modelling, 102, 105588. Crossref. Web of Science.Al-Nassar N. S. (2024). Can gold hedge against inflation in the UAE? A nonlinear ARDL analysis in the presence of structural breaks. PSU Research Review, 8(1), 151–166. Crossref.Barbu T. C., Boitan I. A., & Cepoi C. O. (2022). Are cryptocurrencies safe havens during the COVID-19 pandemic? A threshold regression perspective with pandemic-related benchmarks. Economics and Business Review, 8(2), 29–49. 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