Technology as the Silent Factor in International Relations

In August 1858 Queen Victoria and President James Buchanan exchanged telegrams across the Atlantic by a cable laid on the ocean floor. The first message took sixteen hours to send, the cable failed within weeks, and a durable one was laid only in 1866. But the change was permanent. News that had taken ten days to cross the ocean by ship now took minutes, and the management of diplomacy, finance and war could never be the same. No treaty mentioned the cable. It altered international relations silently, and it is an early instance of the topic's claim that technology is a silent factor.

Silent means unspoken and not unimportant. Diplomats negotiate over borders, alliances and trade, and technology rarely appears in the text of their agreements, yet it shapes the options available to them. Historians have long noted this. The stirrup, introduced to Europe in the early medieval period, made mounted shock combat possible and helped to establish the feudal order. Gunpowder allowed kings to batter down the castles of nobles and build centralised states. Navigation instruments and ships that could cross oceans opened the age of empire.

The nineteenth century gives further examples. Railways let Prussia mobilise its army quickly in the wars of unification in 1866 and 1870, and the German general staff planned timetables as carefully as battles. The steamship and the Suez Canal, opened in 1869, shortened the route to India and made the control of Egypt a strategic matter for Britain. The breech loading rifle, the machine gun and the steam powered gunboat gave European powers a decisive advantage over the peoples of Africa and Asia, and the scramble for colonies followed. A gap in technology became a gap in power.

The twentieth century made the connection explicit. The atomic bomb ended the Second World War and created a new international order in which the superpowers were restrained by the fear of mutual destruction. Nuclear deterrence has shaped strategy ever since, and India's decision to test weapons in 1974 and 1998 was linked to its search for security and standing. The Green Revolution, driven by new crop varieties, relieved famine in South Asia and changed its politics, making India less dependent on food aid. In each case the innovation altered the relations between states without being the subject of negotiation.

In each case the innovation altered the relations between states without being the subject of negotiation.

Today the silent factors are less visible still. Most international data traffic travels through submarine cables laid on the sea floor, and the control, repair and tapping of these cables has become a matter of national security. Satellites provide navigation, communication and surveillance, and states depend on the Global Positioning System operated by the United States, which is why Europe, Russia, China and India have built their own systems. Semiconductors, produced by a handful of firms in a few countries, have become the focus of export controls and trade disputes, and the dispute between the United States and China over the telecommunications firm Huawei is in part about who will build the networks of the future.

Technology also changes the nature of conflict. In the war between Armenia and Azerbaijan in 2020, drones supplied by Turkey and Israel destroyed Armenian tanks and air defences, and decided the campaign in a matter of weeks. Cyber attacks, such as the Stuxnet worm that damaged Iranian centrifuges around 2010, allow states to harm one another without declaring war. Disinformation spread through social media has been used to influence elections. The line between war and peace becomes harder to draw when the weapons are code and the battlefield is the public mind.

It would be wrong to treat technology as an autonomous force that simply acts on states. Melvin Kranzberg wrote in 1985 that technology is neither good nor bad, nor is it neutral. It is developed and deployed by humans with interests, and the same invention has different effects according to who controls it. States invest in research to gain advantage, restrict exports to deny it to rivals and set standards to favour their industries. The race for artificial intelligence and quantum computing is explicit in the strategies of major powers. The silence is a matter of attention and not of absence of politics.

For a country like India this raises practical issues. A country that does not make its own critical technologies, such as defence equipment, semiconductors or digital platforms, depends on others and can be pressed by them. The push for self reliance in defence production and the building of a national digital payments system reflect an awareness of this. At the same time, technology gives a developing country a chance to leap ahead, as mobile phones allowed millions without landlines to connect, and as space missions at low cost have raised India's standing.

Even peaceful technology redistributes influence. The standards for mobile networks, the languages of programming and the rules of online platforms are written in a few places, and the countries that write them gain a quiet leverage over the countries that merely use them. Technology also poses problems that no state can solve alone. Climate change, pandemics and the regulation of artificial intelligence require cooperation across borders, and the pace of innovation outstrips the pace of treaties. International law, designed for a world of armies and borders, is poorly equipped for cyberspace and for the governance of data. The result is a space where rules are written by firms and by the strongest states. Whoever sets the standards for the next technology will shape relations among nations for decades.

The paradox is that what is silent in diplomacy may be the loudest thing in history. A future historian may say that the treaties and speeches of our time were froth on a current set moving by invention, and that the real negotiations were conducted in laboratories and factories. Or she may say that technology only amplified choices that human beings made for reasons they could have named. We cannot yet tell which account will be thought correct, and the factor that is hardest to hear may be the one that is already deciding.