Not long ago, digital security and physical security appeared to be distinct issues. No longer. With each successive crisis over the past decade — from the first Trump trade war and the pandemic, through to the Ukraine and now Iran wars — it has become clear that security is an all-encompassing issue.
One of the most acute intellectual failures of elites and leaders — and, yes, journalists — in recent decades was a communal sense that a digitizing, globalizing world was an inevitability; that ultimately, a just-in-time economy more ensconced in the internet was not actually rooted in the physical world. How wrong that was.
Take the race for AI, on the face of it is a great-power superpower faceoff to put the best talent to work in order to develop cutting-edge software. Iranian attacks on the Gulf, hitting data centers key to the advancement of AI, destroyed that notion. Indeed, even before that war, the block on data center expansion was not access to finance but access to power, land, and chips.
Those three factors denote physical constraints: If the power is green, where will the copper come from to build the transmission cables, and if it isn’t, how can you guarantee unimpeded supplies? Where is the land, and what threats are there to it? And where will the chips come from? If your answer at all involves Taiwan, well, enough said.
If anything, the brief post-Cold War heyday was the historical outlier, lulling executives, policymakers, and voters into a sense of complacency — where constraints were ephemeral rather than tangible.
Security is once again atop our collective agenda, w
