Geopolitics - Geoeconomics - Geotechnology

DeepSeek and other Chinese AI companies have shown how open-source fine-tuning of LLMs can achieve superior results to their CapEx intensive American rivals, dealing a body blow to the latter's share value. We should not be surprised!

Most analysts of global affairs are experts in either geopolitics, geoeconomics or geotechnology – but rarely all three. Yet it is precisely a fluency in all of these domains that is essential to understand today's world. As stated in Hybrid Reality (2012): The balance of innovation drives the balance of power.

Here is the infographic from that book that captures this iron triangle that shapes global power dynamics:

Global companies and smart governments need much more "Technology Quotient" (TQ) to navigate the future – a central concept from Hybrid Reality that is also summarized in this Harvard Business Review essay.

In Connectography (2016), I laid out how the tug-of-war over global supply chains and infrastructure would determine winners and losers in the 21st century –?with China's Belt & Road Initiative (BRI) and "use it or lose it" approach to territory remapping key geographies. I called this paradigm "competitive connectivity" in which gravity matters more than size, and cities and stateless companies can outmaneuver countries.

Now the US (both under Biden and Trump) is frantically trying to catch up through export controls, tariffs, industrial policy and land grabs. Despite Trump's antagonistic approach to Canada, Mexico, Panama, Denmark and others, there is no doubt that a de facto "North American Union" and "Arctic Alliance" are forming – both of which I wrote about extensively in The Second World (2008) and Connectography (2016).

The dynamics between Europe and Asia on the world's largest mega-continent of Eurasia are even more interesting. As trust weakens across the Atlantic, Europe is backtracking on its recent pledges to curtail Chinese commercial advances by inviting Chinese companies into Europe as investors, especially in EVs and other sectors. As I explained in The Future is Asian (2019), the new Silk Roads are not merely a soft historical allusion but rather the most robust axis of trade in the world. Ultimately, the fate of Eurasia will not be to succumb to Chinese hegemony but to remain a fluid and multipolar, multicivilizational zone featuring flows of commerce, conquest and culture simultaneously.