Over the past 12 months, Spectrum’s editors have seen an rising via line connecting a number of main tales: the centrality of expertise to geopolitics. Final month, our cowl story, achieved in partnership with Overseas Coverage journal, was on the way forward for submarine warfare. And final October, we centered on how sea drones may bolster Taiwan’s “silicon shield” strategy, which rests on Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.’s domination of high-end chip manufacturing.
So after I requested the curator of this concern, Senior Editor Samuel K. Moore, what he noticed as the most important theme as we head into 2025, I wasn’t shocked when he mentioned, with out hesitation, “geopolitics and expertise.”
In reality, the identical day Sam and I spoke, I forwarded to Spectrum’s Glenn Zorpette a information merchandise about China banning the export to the USA of gallium, germanium and antimony. China’s overwhelming command of uncommon earths like these is on the coronary heart of Zorpette’s story on this concern. “Inside an American Rare Earth Boomtown” paints a vivid image of how the USA is attempting to nurture a home uncommon earth mining and processing trade.
China, in the meantime, is itself seeking to decrease its personal dependence on imported uranium by constructing a thorium-based molten-salt reactor in the Gobi Desert. And tensions between China and Taiwan will undoubtedly be additional harassed with the opening of TSMC’s first advanced wafer fab in the United States this 12 months.
The mitigation of climate change is one other key space the place politics informs tech advances. In “Startups Begin Geoengineering the Sea”, Senior Affiliate Editor Emily Waltz takes readers aboard a pair of barges anchored close to the Port of Los Angeles. There, two firms, Captura and Equatic, are piloting marine carbon-capture methods to strip CO2 out of ocean water. Whether or not the outcomes will be measured precisely sufficient to assist firms and international locations meet their carbon-reduction objectives is an open query.
A technique for the worldwide group to review the impacts of those efforts might be Deep’s Sentinel program, the primary a part of which might be accomplished this 12 months. Our correspondent Liam Critchley, primarily based in England, reviews in “Making Humans Aquatic Again” that Deep, positioned in Bristol, is constructing a modular habitat that may let scientists dwell underwater for weeks at a time.
One other geopolitical concern additionally lies at sea: the vulnerability of undersea fiber-optic cables, which carry an ever-growing share of the world’s Web site visitors. The potential for outages as a result of assault 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 expertise will outline the way forward for geopolitics revealed in Overseas Affairs in 2023, Eric Schmidt, chair of the Particular Aggressive Research Mission and the previous CEO and chair of Google, argues that “a rustic’s capability to mission energy within the worldwide sphere—militarily, economically, and culturally—relies on its capability to innovate sooner and higher than its rivals.” On this concern, you’ll get an concept of how varied nations are faring on this regard. Within the coming 12 months, you’ll be able to sit up for our persevering with analysis of how the new U.S. administration’s policies on fundamental analysis, local weather change, regulation, and immigration affect world competitors for the uncooked supplies and human assets that stoke the engines of innovation.
