Over the last year, Spectrum’s editors have noticed an emerging through line connecting several major stories: the centrality of technology to geopolitics. Last month, our cover story, done in partnership with Foreign Policy magazine, was on the future of submarine warfare. And last October, we focused on how sea drones could bolster Taiwan’s “silicon shield” strategy, which rests on Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.’s domination of high-end chip manufacturing.
So when I asked the curator of this issue, Senior Editor Samuel K. Moore, what he saw as the major theme as we head into 2025, I wasn’t surprised when he said, without hesitation, “geopolitics and technology.”
In fact, the same day Sam and I spoke, I forwarded to Spectrum’s Glenn Zorpette a news item about China banning the export to the United States of gallium, germanium and antimony. China’s overwhelming command of rare earths like these is at the heart of Zorpette’s story in this issue. “Inside an American Rare Earth Boomtown” paints a vivid picture of how the United States is trying to nurture a domestic rare earth mining and processing industry.
China, meanwhile, is itself looking to minimize its own dependence on imported uranium by building a thorium-based molten-salt reactor in the Gobi Desert. And tensions between China and Taiwan will undoubtedly be further stressed with the opening of TSMC’s first advanced wafer fab in the United States this year.
The mitigation of climate change is another key area where politics informs tech advances. In “Startups Begin Geoengineering the Sea”, Senior Associate Editor Emily Waltz takes readers aboard a pair of barges anchored near the Port of Los Angeles. There, two companies, Captura and Equatic, are piloting marine carbon-capture systems to strip CO2 out of ocean water. Whether the results can be measured accurately enough to help companies and countries meet their carbon-reduction goals is an open question.
One way for the international community to study the impacts of these efforts could be Deep’s Sentinel program, the first part of which will be completed this year. Our correspondent Liam Critchley, based in England, reports in “Making Humans Aquatic Again” that Deep, located in Bristol, is building a modular habitat that will let scientists live underwater for weeks at a time.
Another geopolitical concern also lies at sea: the vulnerability of undersea fiber-optic cables, which carry an ever-growing share of the world’s Internet traffic. The possibility of outages due to attack or accident is so worrying that NATO is funding a project to quickly detect undersea-cable damage and reroute data to satellites.
In a provocative commentary on why technology will define the future of geopolitics published in Foreign Affairs in 2023, Eric Schmidt, chair of the Special Competitive Studies Project and the former CEO and chair of Google, argues that “a country’s ability to project power in the international sphere—militarily, economically, and culturally—depends on its ability to innovate faster and better than its competitors.” In this issue, you’ll get an idea of how various nations are faring in this regard. In the coming year, you can look forward to our continuing analysis of how the new U.S. administration’s policies on basic research, climate change, regulation, and immigration impact global competition for the raw materials and human resources that stoke the engines of innovation.