Geopolitics/Geoeconomics Thread - June 2015

[bala]

I briefly talked about the dynamics of R U I C. There is a slight shift happening after DJT / Russia meet at Alaska. Putin and DJT are trying to wrap up Ukraine conflict (on Putin's terms mostly). This leaves the EU and U relationship at odds for a long time. Poor Zels he is relegated to picking up the pieces from the R U tussle. The side effect is that C and R, who were together due to Ukraine with C trying to dictate to R certain terms and conditions, is now at stake. The Alaska tete-a-tete has pushed C into another friendless juncture. Both U and R settling Ukraine leaves C all alone with nothing to lean upon. Perhaps this caused C to reach out to I and anchor something on the eco front at least. Pak is now effectively shunned by C due to Pak and U being pals again. Now the interesting thing is that I and U seem to be initially at odds due to R but R and U are on track to resolve Ukraine, which effectively means the triangle of R U I is being bolstered to the chagrin of C. The U I relationship is going to be driven by factors other than what the US Deep State faction wanted and this is rather vexsome for them. R will try to clinch some more major strategic partnership with I by taking in all favorable windfall factors into consideration. For I it is tails I win, heads I win scenario.

[drnayar]

Meanwhile meloni s Italy has moved over to importing the peacefuls and onto the jokers camp ,

[A_Gupta]

I am told by an ex-Somalian that Türkiye now controls Somalia. I’ll try to find other sources.

[Vayutuvan]

... effectively means the triangle of R U I is being bolstered to the chagrin of C. ... For I it is tails I win, heads I win scenario.

@bala ji, aap ke muh mein ghee shakkar. But that is overly optimistic IMHO. Hope even half of what you are predicting comes true. One of the immediate problems for Bharat right now is what to do with Tejas which needs the GE engines.

[ricky_v]

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-s ... ell-newman

This new era will be shaped by weapons of economic and technological coercion—sanctions, supply chain attacks, and export measures—that repurpose the many points of control in the infrastructure that underpins the interdependent global economy. For over two decades, the United States has unilaterally weaponized these chokepoints in finance, information flows, and technology for strategic advantage. But market exchange has become hopelessly entangled with national security, and the United States must now defend its interests in a world in which other powers can leverage chokepoints of their own.

In a little-noticed speech in June, Secretary of State Marco Rubio hinted at the administration’s reasoning. China had “cornered the market” for rare earths, putting the United States and the world in a “crunch,” he said. The administration had come to realize “that our industrial capability is deeply dependent on a number of potential adversary nation-states, including China, who can hold it over our head,” shifting the “nature of geopolitics,” in “one of the great challenges of the new century.”



Although Rubio emphasized self-reliance as a solution, the administration’s rush to make a deal demonstrates the limits of going it alone. The United States is ratcheting back its own threats to persuade adversaries not to cripple vital parts of the U.S. economy. Other powers, too, are struggling to figure out how to advance their interests in a world in which economic power and national security are merging, and economic and technological integration have turned from a promise to a threat.

Washington had to remake its national security state after other countries developed the atomic bomb; in a similar way, it will have to rebuild its economic security state for a world in which adversaries and allies can also weaponize interdependence. In short, economic weapons are proliferating just as nuclear weapons did, creating new dilemmas for the United States and other powers. China has adapted to this new world with remarkable speed; other powers, such as European countries, have struggled. All will have to update their strategic thinking about how their own doctrines and capabilities intersect with the doctrines and capabilities of other powers, and how businesses, which have their own interests and capabilities, will respond.

As China rapidly adapts to the new realities of weaponized interdependence, it is building its own alternative “stack” of mutually reinforcing high-tech industries centered on the energy economy. Europe is floundering at the moment, but over time, it may also create its own alternative suite of technologies. The United States, uniquely, is flinging its institutional and technological advantages away. A failure by Washington to meet the changes in the international system will not only harm U.S. national interests but also threaten the long-term health of U.S. firms and the livelihoods of American citizens.

Weaponized interdependence is an unanticipated byproduct of the grand era of globalization that is drawing to a close. After the Cold War ended, businesses built an interdependent global economy on top of U.S.-centered infrastructure. The United States’ technological platforms—the Internet, e-commerce, and, later, social media—wove the world’s communications systems together. Global financial systems also combined thanks to dollar clearing, in which businesses directly or indirectly use U.S. dollars for international deals; correspondent banks that implement such transactions; and the SWIFT financial messaging network. U.S.-centered semiconductor manufacturing was spun out into a myriad of specialized processes across Europe and Asia, but key intellectual property, such as semiconductor software design, remained in the hands of a few U.S. companies. Each of these systems could be understood as its own “stack,” interconnected complexes of related technologies and services that came to reinforce one another, so that, for example, buying into the open Internet increasingly meant buying into U.S. platforms and e-commerce systems, too. At a time when geopolitics seemed the stuff of antiquated Cold War thrillers, few worried about becoming dependent on economic infrastructure provided by other countries.

That was a mistake for Washington’s adversaries and, eventually, for its allies, too. After the 9/11 attacks in 2001, the United States began using these systems to pursue terrorists and their backers. Over two decades of cumulative experimentation, U.S. authorities expanded their ambitions and reach. The United States graduated from exploiting financial chokepoints against terrorists to deploying sanctions to target banks and, in time, to cutting entire countries, such as Iran, out of the global financial system. The Internet was transformed into a global surveillance apparatus, allowing the United States to demand that platforms and search companies, which were regulated by U.S. authorities, hand over crucial strategic information on their worldwide users.

This was the context in which we first wrote about weaponized interdependence in 2019. By that point, many of the most important economic networks underpinning globalization—communications, finance, production—had become so highly centralized that a small number of key firms and economic actors effectively controlled them. Governments that could assert authority over these firms, most notably the U.S. government, could tap them for information about their adversaries or exclude rivals from access to these vital points in the global economy. Over two decades, the United States had built institutions to assert and direct this authority in response to a series of particular crises.

Moreover, it was fundamentally unstable. American actions would invite reactions by targets and counteractions by the United States. The biggest powers could play offense, looking for vulnerabilities that they, too, could exploit. Smaller powers might seek to use less accountable or transparent channels of exchange, effectively building dark spaces into the global economy. The more the United States turned interconnections against its adversaries, the more likely it was that these adversaries—and even allies—would disconnect, hide, or retaliate. As others weaponized interdependence, the connecting fabric of the global economy would be rewoven according to a new logic, creating a world based more on offense and defense than on common commercial interest.

According to The Washington Post, a document drafted by Biden administration officials intended to limit the use of sanctions to urgent national security problems inexorably shriveled from 40 pages to eight pages of toothless recommendations. One former official complained of a “relentless, never-ending, you-must-sanction-everybody-and-their-sister . . . system” that was “out of control.”


Similar worries plagued export controls. Policy experts warned that technology restrictions encouraged China to escape the grasp of the United States and develop its own ecosystem of advanced technologies. That did not stop the Biden administration, which in its final weeks announced an extraordinarily ambitious scheme to divide the entire world into three parts: the United States and a few of its closest friends as a chosen elite, the large majority of countries in the middle, and a small number of bitter adversaries at the bottom of the heap. Through export controls, the United States and its close partners would retain access to both the semiconductors used to train powerful AI and the most recent “weights”—the mathematical engines that drive frontier models—while denying them to U.S. adversaries and forcing most countries to sign up to general restrictions. If this worked, it would ensure a long-term American advantage in AI.

Although the Trump administration abandoned this grand technocratic master plan, it certainly has not abandoned the goal of U.S. dominance and control of chokepoints. The problem for the United States is that others are not sitting idly by. Instead, they are building the economic and institutional means to resist.

The weapons of interdependence have been proliferating for several years and are now being deployed to counter U.S. power. As China and the European Union began to understand their risks, they, too, tried to shore up their own vulnerabilities and perhaps take advantage of the vulnerabilities of others. For these great powers, as for the United States, simply identifying key economic chokepoints is not enough. It is also necessary to build the state apparatus that can gather sufficient information to grasp the immediate benefits and risks and then put that information to use. China’s approach is coming to fruition as it presses on the United States’ vulnerabilities to force it to the negotiating table. By contrast, Europe’s internal institutional weaknesses force it to vacillate, putting it in a dangerous position vis-à-vis the United States and China.

These fears translated into policy actions as the Chinese Communist Party developed a “whole-of-nation system” to secure China’s technological independence, calling for “breakthroughs in major ‘chokepoint’ technologies and products.” China also began to think about how it could better exploit its advantages in rare-earth mining and processing, where it had gained a stranglehold as U.S. and other companies fell out of the market. China’s power in this sector comes not from a simple monopoly over the minerals, which the country doesn’t fully possess, but from its domination of the economic and technological ecosystem necessary to extract and process them. Notably, these critical minerals are used for a variety of high-tech industrial purposes, including producing the specialized magnets that are crucial to cars, planes, and other sophisticated technologies.

In 2020, Beijing put in place an export control law that repurposed the basic elements of the U.S. system. This was followed in 2024 by new regulations restricting the export of dual-use items. In short order, China built a bureaucratic apparatus to turn chokepoints into practical leverage. China also realized that in a world of weaponized interdependence, power comes not from possessing substitutable commodities but from controlling the technological stack. Just as the United States restricted the export of chip manufacturing equipment and software, China forbade the export of equipment necessary to process rare earths. These complex regulatory systems provide China not only with greater control but also with crucial information about who is buying what, allowing it to target other countries’ pain points with greater finesse.

This is why American and European manufacturers found themselves in a bind this June. China did not use its new export control system simply to retaliate against Trump but to squeeze Europe and discourage it from siding with the United States. German car manufacturers such as Mercedes and BMW worried as much as their U.S. competitors that their production lines would grind to a halt without specialized magnets. When the United States and China first reached a provisional deal, Trump announced on Truth Social that “FULL MAGNETS, AND ANY NECESSARY RARE EARTHS, WILL BE SUPPLIED, UP FRONT, BY CHINA,” recognizing the urgency of the threat to the U.S. economy. China’s long-term problem is that its state is too powerful and too willing to intervene in the domestic economy for purely political purposes, hampering investment and potentially strangling innovation. Still, in the short term, it has built the critical capacity to reimpose controls as it deems necessary to resist further U.S. demands.

Whether Europe can withstand pressure from Beijing—and, for that matter, from Washington—remains an open question. Europe has many of the capacities of a geoeconomic superpower but lacks the institutional machinery to make use of them. The SWIFT system, after all, is based in Belgium, as is Euroclear, the settlement infrastructure for many euro-based assets. European companies—including the Dutch semiconductor lithography giant ASML, the German enterprise software firm SAP, and the Swedish 5G provider Ericsson—occupy key chokepoints in technology stacks. The European single market is by some measures the second largest in the world, potentially allowing it to squeeze companies that want to sell goods to European businesses and consumers.


But that would require Europe to build its own comprehensive suite of institutions and independent stack of technologies. That is unlikely to happen in the short to medium term, unless the nascent “EuroStack” project, which aims to secure Europe from foreign interference by building an independent information technology base, really takes off. Even though Europe woke up to the danger of weaponized interdependence during the first Trump administration, it quickly fell back asleep.

In fairness, the EU’s weaknesses also reflect its unique circumstances: it depends on an outside military patron. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has heightened Europe’s short-term dependence on the United States, even as European countries struggle to bolster their defensive capacities. The Biden administration put a friendly gloss on economic coercion, coordinating with European governments such as the Netherlands to limit exports of ASML’s machinery to China. At the same time, the United States provided Europe with the detailed intelligence that it needed to wield financial sanctions and export controls against Russia, obviating the need for Europe to develop its own abilities.

One immediate test is whether Europe will use its purported big bazooka, the “anti-coercion instrument,” or let it rust into obsolescence. This complex legal mechanism—which allows the EU to respond to coercion through a broad set of tools, including limiting market access, foreign direct investment, and public procurement—is supposed to allow Brussels to retaliate against allies and adversaries. The instrument was conceived as a response to the threat of Trump’s first administration and hastily retrofitted to provide a means of pushing back against China.

In a remarkable deal with the United Arab Emirates, the Trump administration agreed to facilitate the massive expansion of data centers in the region using advanced U.S. semiconductors despite continued relations between the UAE and China and warnings from policy experts that the United States should not depend on the Middle East for AI.

Nuclear doctrines focused on predicting a single adversary’s responses; today, when geopolitics is shaped in large part by weaponized interdependence, governments must navigate a terrain with many more players, figuring out how to redirect private-sector supply chains in directions that do not hurt themselves while anticipating the responses of a multitude of governmental and
nongovernmental actors.

Successful strategy in an age of weaponized interdependence requires building up these very institutions to make them more flexible and more capable of developing the deep expertise that is needed to understand an enormously complex world in which Washington’s adversaries now hold many of the cards. That may be a difficult sell for a political system that has come to see expertise as a dirty word, but it is vitally necessary to preserve the national interest.

[gakakkad]

Some chatter going on in social media about a think tank (supposedly ORF) being compromised . Prima facie appears to be babu vs babu fight but could be more sinister. Jaishankar or sameer saran could be targets . Interesting times

[A_Gupta]

ORF was supposedly 100% funded by Ambani initially and now to the extent of 60%. EAM Jaishankar's son is something significant in ORF. This ties in with what I mentioned somewhere, that Ambani supposedly betrayed Modi per social media.

[uddu]

Old news. Said to be new toolkit propped up to attack our Foreign minister when they were talking with the Russians and the Chinese.

[uddu]

World Order Influx: Lessons From History by Sanjeev Sanyal

In this insightful speech, renowned economist and historian Sanjeev Sanyal pointed to the events of 1025, when Chola king Rajendra Chola launched a naval expedition against the Srivijaya Empire in Southeast Asia. The Srivijayas had taken control of both the Malacca and Sunda straits and had increased tariffs on passing ships, affecting Chola trade. Sanjeev Sanyal mentioned, “When these temples were destroyed, the financial base of our maritime power was destroyed.” Towards the end of his discourse, Sanyal elaborated that the historical link between financial and military strength remains relevant. “Our ancestors knew that to protect economic power, you sometimes have to be willing to back it with hard power,” he said. He also explained the shifts in world power since World War II, the rise and fall of global superpowers, and the implications for India's role on the world stage.

[A_Gupta]

It has been pointed out before by historians that the source of European power starting from the 1600s was their ability to disrupt and control the within-Asia maritime trade.

[A_Gupta]

The Asahi Shimbun, August 27:

West frets over China’s interest in Vietnam tungsten mine, sources say
https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/15990791

HANOI--American and other Western officials are worried a Vietnamese tungsten mine and refinery may come under Chinese control, potentially hampering access to a major source of the critical mineral outside China, people with knowledge of the matter said.

Heightened U.S.-Sino trade tensions have seen China, by far the world’s dominant supplier of tungsten, restrict exports of the hard metal as well as other critical minerals in retaliation for U.S. tariff policies.

The Nui Phao complex in northern Vietnam is owned by Masan High-Tech Materials, a subsidiary of the Masan conglomerate which has flagged its interest in selling the asset, five sources said.

[A_Gupta]

Japan's trade envoy postpones US trip as Tokyo wants faster action on tariffs deal
Japan’s top trade negotiator has abruptly canceled a trip to Washington aimed at issuing a joint statement on a tariffs deal with the Trump administration
https://abcnews.go.com/International/wi ... -125050333

In July, the two sides agreed on a 15% tax on imports of most Japanese goods, effective Aug. 1, down from an earlier 25% rate announced by President Donald Trump as so-called “reciprocal tariffs” on the major U.S. ally. Japanese officials discovered days later that the preliminary deal would add a 15% tariff to other tariffs and objected. Officials in Washington have acknowledged the mistake and agreed to abide by the agreement on a 15% tariff, and to refund any excess import duties that were paid.

So far, that hasn't happened.

“We will strongly request the United States to amend its presidential order to correct the reciprocal tariffs and to issue the presidential order to lower tariffs on autos and auto parts,” Hayashi said.

[A_Gupta]

US reaffirms Greenland's right to self-determination amid political sway allegations
https://www.reuters.com/world/us-reaffi ... 025-08-28/

COPENHAGEN, Aug 28 (Reuters) - The United States' top diplomat in Denmark has reaffirmed Greenland's right to determine its own future, following Danish intelligence reports alleging that private U.S. citizens attempted to sway political sentiment in the Arctic territory.

Chargé d’Affaires Mark Stroh met with Danish and Greenlandic officials in Copenhagen on Wednesday. Denmark summoned him in response to a report by public broadcaster DR, saying at least three Americans with ties to President Donald Trump were suspected of promoting opposition to Danish rule in an effort to encourage Greenland’s secession.

[ricky_v]

apologies, the map of india is wrong

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy ... 025-09-02/

Russia and China gave their blessing to the Power of Siberia 2 pipeline but have yet to agree on pricing, Gazprom said on Tuesday, underscoring President Xi Jinping's disregard for Western demands that he row back from a deepening partnership with Moscow.
The pipeline, which could one day deliver an additional 50 billion cubic metres (bcm) of gas per year to China through Mongolia from the Arctic gas fields of Yamal, hands the world's largest energy consumer greater options to hedge against future reliance on U.S. liquefied natural gas.

Miller said that an agreement had been reached to increase supplies via the existing Power of Siberia pipeline, which runs from Eastern Siberia to China, to 44 billion cubic metres (bcm) a year from 38 bcm.
But the price of gas supplied via the new pipeline - one of the key factors for understanding the cost of building the pipeline and how those costs will be shared amongst the parties involved - will be agreed separately, Miller was quoted as saying.

The price, Miller said, would be lower than the price charged by Gazprom to European buyers due to the vast distances and terrain over which pipelines had to be built.
The Kremlin said that 22 agreements had been signed during Chinese talks, including a deal on strategic cooperation between Gazprom and China National Petroleum Corporation, but it gave no details. Nor did China.


Building a gas pipeline from the vast Bovanenkovo and Kharasavey gas fields of northern Russia across the wilderness of Siberia to Mongolia and then to China would be the world's biggest and most capital-intensive gas project, Miller said.
China is Russia's biggest trading partner, the biggest purchaser of Russian crude and Russian gas, the second-biggest purchaser of Russian coal and the third-biggest purchaser of Russian LNG, according to the Kremlin.
Gazprom supplies natural gas to China through a 3,000 km (1,865 mile) pipeline called Power of Siberia under a 30-year, $400 billion deal launched at the end of 2019 and supplies are expected to reach the planned capacity of 38 bcm this year.
Miller said there had also been an agreement to increase the gas China buys through a pipeline from Sakhalin Island in Russia's Far East to 12 bcm annually from a prior agreement for 10 bcm.

[ricky_v]

speaking of mercs
https://www.newsweek.com/mercenary-stor ... on-2127134

With mercenaries increasingly seen as a go-to solution for some of the world's most devilish security problems, Blackwater founder and Donald Trump donor Erik Prince is reported to be pitching his private military services in Ukraine.

Russia's dependence on hired guns for its costly invasion of Ukraine is well-known, at first through the cocktail of atrocities and treason served up by the Wagner Group, and now via an elaborate ecosystem of other Kremlin-linked corporations fielding tens of thousands of Russian "volunteers" on the frontlines, supplemented by third-country mercenaries from Asia and Africa.

African states, too, have started hiring Russian, Turkish, Romanian, and South African private military companies (PMCs) to battle insurgencies, to deploy drones against jihadists, and to reclaim resource-rich areas taken over by rebels.

Prince, whose Blackwater contractors marked a nadir in Iraq with the Nisour Square massacre in 2007, currently operates under the banner of Vectus Global. The firm has negotiated a contract to combat gang violence in mineral-rich Haiti, deploying up to 200 private military contractors and weaponized drones. This builds on a deal with Ecuador from earlier this year, where Prince explained that his forces were "providing law enforcement and the military the tools and the tactics to effectively combat the narco-gangs."

The Trump administration denied it has any links to Vectus Global's work in Haiti. But the administration has itself quietly turned to American PMCs to solve knotty problems in Gaza: first as a compromise force to man the controversial Netzarim checkpoint during the ceasefire in early 2025, which appeared to be effective; and second, as security providers for the Israeli Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which has proved a multivalent disaster.

It is no coincidence that mercenaries are making a comeback at a time when all the old rules are being re-written. Pax Americana is ending. Global power is rebalancing. Mercenaries are ideal disruptors in a post-truth reality marked by democratic backsliding and grey-zone warfare. They divorce military adventures from their political costs because voting publics don't necessarily "feel" or even know about any deaths. They have no official return address, making it difficult sometimes to be certain who an attack came from and how to answer it. They also effectively remove the possibility of redress, as it's hard to go after them for war crimes.

It could be a matter of time before these two mercenary models clash on the battlefield—each side with access to its own air force through cheap drones—replicating and expanding the core dynamic of the civil war in Libya in 2019-2020, which was fought by opposing mercenary armies.

Furthermore, mercenaries have proven to be vectors of instability. After their contracts ended in Yemen and Libya, mercenary armies returned to the Sahel flush with resources, ambition, and combat experience only to initiate major shocks: Tuareg mercenaries reignited a rebellion in Mali that became a jihad, Chadian contract fighters killed the Chadian president, and the Rapid Support Forces launched a sustained and genocidal offensive to seize control of the Sudanese state.

The hundreds, if not thousands, of African nationals now fighting a high-intensity war in Ukraine may reimport similar destabilizing dynamics to the continent, and to the Sahel specifically, when a ceasefire in Ukraine is achieved.

This boomerang effect is only one of the many risks associated with mercenaries, who make wars more affordable, more opaque, more brutal—and more likely. Renewed American interest in mercenaries and PMCs will only accelerate their use globally and may ultimately (re)normalize the medieval notion of killing for profit.

[uddu]

Cross posting from Modi 3.0
MAJOR DEVELOPMENT: Modi Sends AJIT DOVAL To Kolkata! | CWSJ-2512 #manjariagrawal | Sumeet Jain


MAJOR DEVELOPMENT: Modi's Master Strategy Unfolds in Kolkata!

Prime Minister Modi just concluded the 16th Combined Commanders' Conference in Kolkata, unveiling the ambitious Armed Forces Vision 2047 - but there's MORE to this strategic move than meets the eye!

*What's Really Happening:*
Historic military conference held in West Bengal for the first time in years
Revolutionary Northeast connectivity projects linking India to Southeast Asia
Strategic railway expansion connecting Aizawl, Kohima, and border regions
Game-changing infrastructure push towards Vietnam corridor

*The Big Picture:*
Modi's "Act East Policy" is reshaping India's geopolitical landscape! The new Bairabi-Sairang railway line has finally connected Mizoram's capital Aizawl to the national network after 75+ years of independence. This isn't just about trains - it's about creating a DIRECT corridor from Northeast India to Southeast Asia, potentially reaching Vietnam!

*Strategic Implications:*
Enhanced border security through better connectivity
Economic integration of Northeast with national mainstream
Direct trade routes bypassing traditional chokepoints
Military preparedness along China border

*Political Impact:*
By hosting this crucial defense conference in Bengal and announcing massive Northeast projects, Modi is demonstrating central government's commitment to regions often considered peripheral. The timing and location send powerful messages about national integration and strategic priorities.

Don't miss our EXCLUSIVE analysis of how these infrastructure projects are reshaping India's eastern frontiers and creating new geopolitical realities!

[SRajesh]

Sorry did not know where else to post this!!
Balkanisation of states!!
Why Western Nations turning to breakup Global South into smaller manageable states
Reading throught this paper i found this quote very intersting : The Smaller the State the more the chance of joining a Bandwagon
https://uni.hi.is/baldurt/files/2018/09 ... y-5404.pdf
Also here is an intersting take on Yugoslav breakup apart from Ethnicity
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source= ... OlSahhoU2z
It was a multipronged reason : Deny Port, Deprive Lignite and Displace 40% of the population!!
Wow!!
What a way to push a country down by a couple of decades in growth!!

[ricky_v]

good article

https://www.fpri.org/article/2025/09/nu ... stability/

However, the moves by U.S. adversaries to hold at risk U.S. assets in space require new thinking about how to protect those same assets, deter the use of nuclear weapons to target large constellations, and to defend against the novel ways adversaries are now experimenting with to defeat space-based missile defense. The U.S. should consider how to repurpose current missile defense interceptors to hold any Russian co-orbital satellites at risk, make explicit that any nuclear attack on U.S. origin satellites would invite retaliation, continue to invest in sensors to detect missile launch from adversary nations (including those fired south to travel over the South Pole), and to be the insurer of last resort for private satellites that could be destroyed by a hostile act.

The Soviet Union pioneered novel and unique ways to hold U.S. space-based assets at risk. China is now following suit. The United States did dabble in the development of anti-satellite weapons, launching the world’s first direct ascent anti-satellite missile in October 1959. Moscow’s response, in retrospect, set in motion the drivers of the space race that is now threatening to return. In 1961, purportedly in response to U.S. actions in space, Khruschev directed his government to expand work on the militarization of space.


[1]The pursuit of arms control, as John Maurer notes, was not solely some altruistic attempt to make the world safer. Instead, it was part of a series of offset strategies, designed to account for how the United States could retain military superiority over the Soviet Union, even at a time when Moscow had pulled even with the United States in terms of total numbers of nuclear warheads deployed. The Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty was a lynchpin of this strategy. It was designed to cap the number of deployed anti-ballistic missile interceptors around Moscow. For Russia, it capped U.S. deployments, locking in a sense of mutual vulnerability that helped to enhance deterrence.


The Soviet Union, however, continued to test the limits and spirit of the arms control treaties it signed. The period of détente did not hinder Moscow’s interest in the militarization of space and the continued development of orbital platforms to evade U.S. early warning and nascent missile defense architecture.[3] Instead, Soviet designers continued to develop new and innovative ways to attack U.S. satellites and to deliver nuclear weapons to the U.S. homeland. Moscow also views international agreements as tools to add to national power. The Soviet leadership was not constrained by either the Outer Space Treaty or the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT I) when testing space-based weapons and new classes of medium-range missile.

This study will examine the new dynamics in space. For decades, government was the main driver of space innovation. Over the past two decades, the traditional way in which space technology is developed and launched has changed. The rise of companies like Blue Origin and SpaceX has completely altered the economics of space and has revolutionized how goods and humans are sent to the heavens.

The rapid decrease in the cost of launch and satellite construction has increased global connectivity, improved the global economy, and has changed the world profoundly. The growing use of space has also heightened efforts to further militarize the cosmos and creates an obvious incentive for American adversaries to explore ways to hold at risk orbiting constellations with nuclear weapons.

The Soviet space program provides a useful guide about how Moscow has historically sought to circumvent treaty agreements to gain military advantages vis-à-vis the United States. For much of the Cold War, the Soviet Union had fewer nuclear weapons than the United States. However, both sides have used mutual restraint to their advantage. The Soviet Union sought and received limits on American missile defense with the signing of the ABM Treaty, as part of the SALT I agreements.

Almost immediately, however, Russia violated the spirit of the agreement with the development of a Fractional Orbital Bombardment System, or FOBS. Moscow officially pledged not to place nuclear weapons in orbit when it agreed to the Outer Space Treaty in 1966. Article IV of the agreement clearly states that state parties “undertake not to place in orbit around the earth any object carrying nuclear weapons.”[4] The Soviet Union then promptly violated the spirit of the treaty. At the dawn of the missile age, Soviet planners viewed orbital weapons as potentially superior to missile-launched warheads. Military planners correctly argued that an orbital weapon would have an unlimited flight range, be able to strike targets simultaneously from two different directions, have unpredictable trajectories and faster flight times to targets. These advantages would obviate any advantage a defender could gain from missile defense, thereby ensuring the credibility of a retaliatory nuclear strike.[5]

At the dawn of the Cold War, both the United States and the Soviet Union explored orbital bombardment concepts. The idea is that you can place something in orbit and, after a fraction of an orbit or a total orbit around the earth, it can then be de-orbited to strike targets on the ground. Orbit is a state of being. An object placed in orbit is moving fast enough that it continues to fall over the horizon faster than it does back to earth. To come back to earth, an object in space must slow down. This is how a FOBS would work: An object is inserted into orbit and then fires a small rocket to slow down and fall to its target. One advantage of such a system is that you do not have to fire a missile on a ballistic arc, therefore decreasing early warning time for the defending state. The other advantage is that an attacking state could insert an object into orbit over Antarctica (flying south) and have the object “take the long way around” the earth. This object then would avoid U.S. early warning radar and missile defense tracking, which remain pointed at the North Pole (the shortest distance between the United States and Russia and China).

In retrospect, Moscow’s interest in the ABM Treaty makes more sense. The Soviet Union agreed to place reciprocal limits on missile defense deployment. It did so knowing that it had other tools to hedge against any qualitative advancement in U.S. missile defense interceptors and that it could still hold at risk U.S. targets with nuclear weapons deployed in exotic ways.

The Soviet Union tested and deployed this FOBS in 1967, just months after the leadership in Moscow signed the Outer Space Treaty. The United States chose to accept the Soviet legalese explaining away the violation: The weapon did a fractional orbit but the treaty ostensibly only covered a full orbit, thereby giving some wiggle room to President Lyndon Johnson to ignore the violation.[6] The Soviet FOBS system remained operational for close to two decades, before being dismantled in 1983.

As we look back at the early days of the space race, the paranoia about Sputnik is often how Americans frame the U.S. government’s subsequent effort to conquer the cosmos. However, in Moscow, a similar paranoia had taken hold and drove its own ambitions in space. In a forgotten part of the early Cold War, the Soviet Union shot down numerous American surveillance aircraft over the Baltic Sea and over Hokkaido in the Pacific between 1950 and 1952.[7] Moscow’s belligerence prompted American innovation, sparking the development of the U-2 aircraft in 1954. The use of the U-2 to overfly the Soviet Union prompted Moscow’s push for more capable air defense, ending in the shooting down and capture of Francis Gary Powers in 1960.

The U.S. response, as is now well known, was to push forward with the development of reconnaissance satellites. Moscow noticed. In 1959, according to Dr. Asif A. Siddiqi, “Khruschev was reportedly personally upset over the possibility of ‘spy’ flights over the Soviet Union” and directed scientific and military personnel to develop the means to identify hostile satellites and to shoot them down. Shortly thereafter, in early 1960, Moscow settled on co-orbital maneuvering satellite that could hard kill satellites in orbit.[8] The Soviets envisioned, at first, this satellite carrying a nuclear warhead, but after studying the effects of nuclear explosions in space, scientists concluded that the blast was indiscriminate. Put simply: It would kill both American and Soviet satellites by frying their electronics.


The United States had reached the same conclusion as their Soviet counterparts. Following the Starfish Prime high-atmospheric nuclear test in 1962, the radiation level in the Van Allen Radiation belt increased. As Robert Vincent wrote in War on the Rocks:

The Van Allen radiation belts perform a crucial task of sweeping charged particles from the sun away from Earth to create a shield against charged particle radiation from low Earth orbit to the surface (below 1,000 kilometers in altitude). … commercial satellites in low Earth orbit take full advantage of the reduced particle radiation and may incorporate standard commercial electronics into their payloads. The use of these components sharply reduces costs.[9]

As a result, the world’s first commercial communications satellite, Telstar, lasted only 8 months in orbit before the residual radiation from the Starfish Prime test destroyed its electronic components.[10]

The Soviet Union settled on a conventional payload for its co-orbital satellite in response because of its own desire to protect its satellites in orbit. In the mid-1970s, it ramped up experiments of exo-atmospheric interception, which culminated in the first single orbit interception in 1976 – a milestone for the project. This period in Soviet space history is often overlooked. A half-decade before President Ronald Reagan announced the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), the Soviet leadership issued a decree to establish Fon, a program to develop orbiting lasers and missiles. The ambitious program was designed to attack orbiting satellites, rather than missiles, and was pursued with some ambition for close to a decade.[11] This program was beset by funding challenges, but a prototype was launched into orbit at the tail end of the Cold War.

SDI codified U.S. policy in space. After decades of seeking to carve out a passive role for satellites, and therefore pushing the Soviets to agree to peaceful use of space, the Reagan administration pushed forward with an ambitious plan to overtly defend U.S. territorial interests with space-based assets. The Reagan administration’s pursuit of space-based missile defense was controversial – and continues to be to this day. However, the investments made in rocket technology has contributed to the development of the technology that has revolutionized space flight over the past decade. The basic idea of SDI was to build missile interceptors in space, capable of tracking and then striking missiles while they are being boosted into space.

The focus on both influence operations and conventional weapons is instructive. It suggests a synergy between both the Russian Federation and Chinese Communist Party about basic concepts for war with the United States. These broad synergies do not necessarily lead to the same preferred tactics, but they do suggest a lesson incorporated from U.S. action in Iraq: the disruption of command and control with conventional attack.

In 2007, a Chinese ballistic missile fired from earth smashed into a satellite orbiting at the upper boundary of low earth orbit. The anti-satellite test destroyed its target and created nearly a thousand pieces of debris.[19] The test was not a shock for U.S. intelligence, which had warned consistently since 2003 that Beijing was working towards this type of capability. A Chinese analyst, writing at the time suggested that the test to enhance Chinese nuclear deterrence. A PLA colonel, writing months before the test, suggested that China needed an anti-satellite capability to challenge the United States in space. [20] The test was a watershed moment for U.S. security planning and thinking about operations in space. In response, the United States sought to demonstrate to China that it too could target satellites in space, ostensibly to prevent the uncontrolled reentry of a defunct satellite back to earth. However, the 2008 shootdown of a U.S. satellite with a modified SM-3 missile undoubtedly signaled that U.S. capabilities were on par, or greater than, those of its adversaries.

The SM-3 is the backbone of the U.S. missile defense architecture in Europe. It also underscores the undeniable linkages between hit-to-kill missile defense interceptors and direct-ascent anti-satellite weapons. In the 2004, the Bush administration set aside funds for the construction of a limited missile defense system. This decision came after the United States chose to withdraw from the ABM Treaty in 2002. The administration argued that the United States should develop ground and sea-based mid-course missile defense interceptors, along with updated terminal defenses, and a slew of new tracking satellites to defend the homeland from attack.[21] The inclusion of this language in the nuclear posture review, I believe, is why Chinese experts explicitly linked the 2007 ASAT test to its own nuclear deterrent. It also explains why adversaries would seek to blind U.S. sensors. The shooting down of a satellite would, of course, both hinder operational command and control for the U.S. military and blind early warning sensors, upending elements of U.S. missile defense, and enhancing the survivability of nuclear forces.

In late 2019, Russia shifted its own operations in space. The United States accused Moscow of launching a single satellite that settled into the same orbit as a U.S. imaging satellite. The Russian satellite then released a second satellite, which could maneuver in orbit and get even closer to U.S. surveillance satellites.[27] A maneuvering co-orbital satellite is exactly what the Soviet Union built and tested in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Russia’s return to this technology, therefore, signaled an intention to revive dormant programs, presumably with the same intent: to integrate anti-satellite operations into nuclear war planning.

It is worth examining how the Soviets thought about the linkage between ground based anti-satellite weapons, missile defense, offensive nuclear strikes, and co-orbiting anti-satellite weapons. The Soviets conducted exercises as late as 1982 with simulated strategic and medium-range missile strikes against U.S. and NATO targets, paired with co-orbital satellites tasked with maneuvering towards a then defunct Soviet satellite to pass close by the target satellite. The Soviets, according to Siddiqi, intended to destroy the target satellite with the co-orbiting chase satellite, but the fusing mechanism failed as it passed by. Moscow also used its space-based assets to test an anti-ballistic missile interceptor.[28] It was only after this large-scale test, where Moscow validated a proof of concept, that the Soviet leadership then chose to embark on an international campaign to limit the weaponization of space. In keeping with historical precedent, in 2022, Russia followed through and tested an updated anti-satellite missile, the Nudol, and destroyed a satellite in orbit.

China also has reportedly developed similar capabilities to maneuver in orbit to get close to U.S. satellites. Beijing has also sanctioned a considerable increase in deployed nuclear weapons. In 2024, the Department of Defense estimated that China had plans to deploy 1,000 nuclear weapons in 2030.[30] The rapid increase would bring Beijing’s deployed arsenal approximately in line with the currently deployed warheads in the United States and Russia.

In October 2021, The Financial Times reported that China had tested in August a hypersonic weapons system that circled the globe and dropped off a munition as the space plane glided back to earth and crashed.[31] This test is the latest iteration of the Soviet orbital bombardment system. Just as was the case previously, the advantage of this system is that China can quickly launch a nuclear weapon into orbit and have it travel in a way that limits warning time and gives planners options about novel routes to attack targets. The advantage of an orbital bombardment system is that the attacker can map current missile defenses and design a way to evade them. This is what China appears to be doing. It is using an older Soviet-era idea, most probably updated with a space plane of some sort, and testing ways to evade missile defense.

It also suggests a change in how Beijing views nuclear-era fighting. The increase in nuclear forces indicates that Chinese planners are re-considering contingency planning for how China would fight a nuclear-armed conflict with the United States, or at least deter such a conflict from ever taking place. This would seem to fit with the investments in space, deployment of ground based anti-satellite missiles, and expansion of nuclear strike options.

American dependence on space for all facets of warfighting, combined with the explosion in the number of satellites in orbit, has once again changed how adversaries think about conflict with the United States. In the past, it was feasible to assign small numbers of anti-satellite missiles that, with the evolution of precision, could be conventionally armed. Thus, an adversary could cost-effectively build up its interceptor magazines to hold at risk space-based assets. This is now no longer feasible. Hitting 7,000+ objects in a Starlink constellation requires building thousands of ground-based interceptors, which is not cost-efficient for the attacker. However, rather than simply accept defeat, adversaries have returned to an efficient way to think about destroying a large number of targets with a correspondingly small number of missiles: the brute force of nuclear weapons.

The Soviet Union understood at the outset of their co-orbital anti-satellite program that a nuclear weapon’s blast would be indiscriminate and kill every satellite in range. However, given the new asymmetry in the numbers of satellites in orbit (there is simply no realistic competitor to U.S. privately owned space companies), the cost-exchange ratio shifts for a potential attacker. The loss of U.S. capabilities with a strike would be so disproportionally large when compared to the loss of other nations that the debate about holding these satellites at risk with nuclear weapons becomes more salient. It also raises interesting questions about how best to defend against this new dynamic. In the past, the United States was at a disadvantage because its satellites would be risked should it target other nation’s satellites – it had much more to lose in a conflict in space than an adversary because it had more satellites and relied more heavily on them.

worthy of further examination.

It is also important for the United States to consider assigning an anti-satellite role to the SM-3 and SM-6 missiles and to increase future purchases to allow for a portion of all future weapon buys to have a dual-deployment role. The United States should assume that any deployment of a Russian or Chinese nuclear-armed, co-orbital satellite will be small. Thus, dedicating a small amount of the total SM-3/6 buy to holding these weapons at risk would be beneficial to the United States. It would also be cost effective and allow for already fielded capabilities to be used to hold adversary assets at risk in space.

The economics of vertical launch should spur considerable work on how to decrease the cost of any proposed kill vehicle for a space-based missile defense. The cost of a large satellite constellation is no longer the barrier to missile defense deployment – instead, it is the cost of the kill vehicle. Working hard towards driving the purchase cost of any such system to a reasonable number would unlock the promise of SDI and Golden Dome and add yet more complexity to Russian and Chinese efforts to “out build” potential missile defense deployments. As part of this approach, the United States may need to consider how to more rapidly design, build, and launch early warning sensors. The idea would be to be able to get off the ground capabilities to augment the current U.S. sensor infrastructure. Such an approach could also give more capabilities for monitoring novel attack profiles, specifically the longer way around the earth to attack U.S. targets from the south.

It is important to think through how Russia and China would respond to any deployment of more capable U.S. missile defenses in space. The first and most obvious way to respond is to build up more nuclear forces. This is why continued engagement on arms control, per the thinking that guided the second offset, is worth undertaking. It would be wise to try and negotiate a trilateral cap on deployed strategic forces, perhaps at the 1,000-warhead mark. This would complicate Russian and Chinese targeting challenges, at a time when U.S. advantages in access to space remain considerable.

China and Russia may also consider developing short burn-time missiles to decrease the amount of time that their forces are in boost phase. This would negate some advantages to a space-based missile defense system and allow for attacking forces to get into mid-course flight more quickly, which is when they can launch countermeasures and decoys. This is yet another reason to consider further improvements to U.S. sensor architecture to increase warning time from launch to detection.

The United States could also update its nuclear doctrine. A nuclear blast in space, targeting U.S.-built products used for U.S. military purposes and in support of U.S. military operations, should be considered a nuclear attack on U.S. forces. This would allow for the United States to hold a reciprocal target at risk to a retaliatory strike, which could help deter an attacking leader from using a nuclear weapon in space.

Finally, the U.S. government should consider becoming the “insurer of last resort” for these companies. The new space industry is worth about $600 billion today, with projections for it to grow to more than $1 trillion in the 2030s. The increasing military contestation described in this paper puts commercial and civil constellations at great risk. This risk is only poorly appreciated by the new space industry, which for the most part is not insured against acts of war. The issue of orbital debris created from military tests is more ambiguous. Insurance companies are beginning to review their coverage and consider what sorts of products are appropriate for an increasingly contested environment. These changes will have a major impact on new space companies. It is in the government’s interest to ensure that innovation does not slow down. One way to do so is to provide further incentives through the provision of insurance, if indeed it does become a hindrance to future space flight.