Strategy

We recently turned to a book we had long set aside—Alexander Stubb’s The Triangle of Power. The current Finnish President has written an engaging work, yet our reflection here is less about the book itself than about a particular perspective it raises, one that has given us pause. Stubb presents a view common in Western discourse: that the post-Cold War liberal international order, founded on rules and multilateralism, was a force for global peace and prosperity, and that its restoration—or preservation, depending on one’s vantage point—is a worthy aspiration. ...

Most of the successful small nations in the world, may it be Singapore, Finland, Estonia, Taiwan or even Ukraine has one thing is common. They have thought about their security, national security before anything else. They have put national defense front and center even before economic policy because they understand the one thing we seem to not: A nations ability to protect it sovereignty in both physical, digital and most importantly cognitive domains is the key to its progress in all other domains. ...

We live in the age of interdependence. No nation — big, small, powerful or weak , nukes or no nukes — can truly sustain itself in isolation. A lesson that was recently reminded to the world’s most powerful nation, The United States. Interconnectedness is not a new phenomenon, in fact since human beings first organized themselves into families, tribes, and communities, survival has depended on cooperation and mutual reliance. But what has changed is the depth and complexity of global integration. ...