Canada & The Great Power Competition

Competition is the rule; war and peace are the exception

“Competition is a fundamental aspect of international relations. As states and non-state actors seek to protect and advance their own interests, they continually compete for advantage.”

The triteness of discussing the Great Power Competition does not change the simple fact that it is real, it is happening, and Canada must take specific and significant actions to safeguard its own interests along with those of its allies.

The longer western nations continue to think of conflict within the binary of war and peace, the further behind we will fall in the pan-domain competition that has already come to define the 21st century. It is a never- ending cycle of actors – state, state-sponsored, non- state, corporate – continuously seeking to create and exploit relative advantages.

Make no mistake, this a competition to define the future world order; our adversaries are seeking, and in some respects, succeeding, to subvert the Western post-WWII rules-based order. They are “boundary stretching” on all fronts and in all conceivable domains, all while seeking to avoid triggering an armed response they are sure to lose, for now at least. While literal battles remain the exception, figurative ones are always raging in the race for emerging and disruptive “dual- use” technologies, the successful adoption of which will confer transformational advantages to nations best able to integrate them into their security and intelligence organizations, military establishments and commercial industries.

Russia & China represent the greatest threats

The ongoing illegal and unprovoked war in Ukraine has revealed Russia to be something of a paper tiger, at least on the battlefield. But it would be foolish to discount Russia’s ongoing pan-domain efforts to subvert competitors, whether through sustained cyber- attacks or its continuing election meddling.

The world seems to rightly agree that China presents the greatest threat to the Western world order in the near to medium term. It has manipulated the Yuan, built islands in internationally contested waters of the South China Sea, and peddled its “debt trap diplomacy” via the Belt and Road. It is believed to be only a matter of time before their ambitions for Taiwan cross the threshold into armed conflict.

Key to all of this for China is their “Military-Civil Fusion” - “an aggressive national strategy to develop the most technologically advanced military in the world ... by systematically reorganizing the Chinese science and technology enterprise to ensure that new innovations simultaneously advance economic and military development”. China’s innovation efforts are greatly bolstered by its industrial-scale cyberespionage and IP theft orchestrated through strategic investments and forced technology transfers.

Alexei Druzhinin, Sputnik via AP

Everyone is competing, whether they know it or not

If the bulk of competition is happening below the threshold of armed conflict, then it logically follows that more than just soldiers are competing. Examined through this lens, we can see that the same competition that is sometimes waged on the battlefield can just as easily extend to the boardroom. Whole industries with no obvious link to the defence and security sectors are nonetheless engaged in “White Collar Warfare” in an effort to create their own relative advantages, whether through market share, IP or influence in the halls of government. The technology researcher and the network security professional are therefore now just as important as the warfigther. Their efforts exist along the same spectrum of competition and the strategic battlespace must now be conceptualized as including all domains within which adversaries, and their proxies, are competing. These same organizations must now understand that they form part of a larger ideological ecosystem and the theft of their IP is as much a business concern as it is one of national security.

©2024 ONE9 Capability Labs