Commentary: This is an era of Davids, not Goliaths

LONDON: Western bankers, unsure whether to attend Saudi Arabia’s annual Future Investment Initiative this month, what with the local airport coming under lethal attack of late, are debating what else FII might stand for. 

“F***ing Insane Idea” captures the mood of general apprehension.

The ongoing failure of the kingdom and its allied states to contain the Houthis, a rebel group, is striking. But it is also consistent with a global era of upsets. Ukraine has frustrated Russia’s assault for almost five years despite being much smaller and having no nuclear deterrent. America is suffering a loss of face in Iran, which was meant to collapse or submit under bombardment by now. The superpower’s forward bases in the Gulf have been exposed as targets, not - or not just - imperial assets. Likewise, in 2022, France gave up its counterinsurgent mission in the Sahel after a draining decade, so that Francafrique now has a self-mocking ring.

In the last century, it was shocking when not one but two empires succumbed to ostensibly weaker Vietnamese forces. In this century, which has brought the Iraq and Afghanistan debacles, such giant-killings are almost banal.

If these upsets were confined to the field of war, we might attribute them to technical change. Lethal kit is better at lower prices than it was a generation ago, enabling the small to torment the big. But the same pattern, of lesser actors thwarting greater ones, holds in the diplomatic world too. 

Last month, America (population of 343 million) signed a deal with Denmark (6 million) over Greenland (57,000) that was nowhere near as one-sided as President Donald Trump had sought, on threat of annexation. Another president might have got the same terms with one-tenth of the fuss.

During the pandemic, Australia called for a world inquiry into the source of COVID-19. China took this as a pointed finger and retaliated with tariffs and the like. Australia, whose population is smaller than that of metropolitan Chongqing, did not fold. It did not so much as let Huawei into its 5G network as an olive branch. In the end, the relationship stabilised, with sectoral but not existential harm done to the Australian economy. For decades to come, the episode will be pored over among middle powers for moral encouragement and tactical clues.

BEHIND THE AGONIES OF GOLIATH

What explains the agonies of Goliath? How is it that apparent titans so often fail to get their way? For one thing, almost all actors, however small, have leverage of some kind.

If it isn’t control of a strait, it might be an indispensable business (the Netherlands has ASML) or even just specialised knowledge. Years of fighting have given Ukraine a technical expertise that it trades for support from other countries. The intellectual problem with “might is right” is that “might” is defined too narrowly. It is taken to mean raw scale: of armaments, of GDP, of population. If that were enough, the world would not look as it does at present.

What’s more, a lot of hard power is in practice unusable, as the moral blowback would be too great. Had Trump resorted to force against Greenland, the US would never have lived it down. In what sense, then, can the option truly be said to have existed? Even Vladimir Putin took four years to use some of the brute methods now on show in Ukraine. China might have pressured Australia harder, but at an unacceptable cost in regional trust. The moral benefit of the doubt is seldom with the larger party and so, unless it is willing to discount all that, a great deal of its power is essentially notional. Saudi Arabia is armed to the teeth, and not.

WHAT IF THERE ARE NO MORE TITANS?

There is one more thing that Davids have going for them in the world of 2026. “Apparent” titans, I said earlier: what if, by historical standards, there are no genuine titans now?

The US has a much smaller share of global output than it did after the second world war. China’s in turn is smaller than that. When either state applies sanctions or tariffs, the target nation will tend to have other places to turn to for trade. 

It also follows that allies of the big two, such as US-aligned Saudi Arabia, cannot be supported without limit. Arms, intelligence assets and diplomatic resources are finite. It is a much less centralised world than the one Harry Truman’s America or even the British empire at its peak held in its hands. No one has had the nuclear monopoly for almost 80 years. The middle-power era that Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney wants to bring into being is half here already, except that lots of those middling states are illiberal.

If the “superpowers” of today are sometimes overestimated, it might be because so much is now seen through the lens of tech. In AI terms, there are indeed just two countries on Earth. AI requires enormous capital and a large enough market to provide a return on it. Sure enough, the US and China command the field. Being the third AI power is akin to being the third richest Gallagher brother.

The trouble is that none of this, for now, maps on to geopolitics, where things are much more fragmented and entropic. Technological hyperscale is a profound advantage . . . in tech. In the three-dimensional world, other things count. To see that world clearly, give the occasional thought to something other than AI.