Reflectii

Executive summary

Over the past several years, militaries around the world have increased interest and investment in the development of artificial intelligence (AI) to support a diverse set of defense and national security goals. However, general comprehension of what AI is, how it factors into the strategic competition between the United States and China, and how to optimize the defense-industrial base for this new era of deployed military AI is still lacking. It is now well past time to see eye to eye in AI, to establish a shared understanding of modern AI between the policy community and the technical community, and to align perspectives and priorities between the Department of Defense (DoD) and its industry partners. Accordingly, this paper addresses the following core questions.

Denmark will join the European Union’s defence policy after a referendum on Wednesday (1 June), final results showed, signalling the latest shift among Nordic countries to deepen defence ties in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The Netherlands and Germany will drill for gas in the North Sea together, with production expected to start in 2024, the Dutch government has announced.

According to the Dutch government’s website, production will take place in the North Sea, about 19 kilometres north of Schiermonnikoog and Borkum. A pipeline is being constructed to get the gas onto the shore.

The revelations of outrageous behavior by the civil servants and advisers closest to British Prime Minister Boris Johnson have become so predictable in their mixture of bureaucratic procedure with B-movie farce, that it now seems surprising when a day goes by without another incident splashed across the morning headlines.

Anyone who grew up in my generation of 1980s kids remembers G.I. Joe action figures — those green-uniformed plastic soldiers you could use to stage battles in the sandbox in your backyard or, for that matter, your bedroom. In those days, when imagery of bombed-out homes, bloodied civilians, and police violence wasn’t accessible on TV screens or in video games like Call of Duty, war in children’s play took place only between soldiers. No civilians were caught up in it as “collateral damage.”

It is an American trait to root for the underdog in any contest that pits David vs. Goliath. Therefore, it is understandable that most Americans (except for extreme MAGA types) are thrilled that Ukrainian forces have pushed the brutal, but hapless, Russian military away from Ukraine’s two largest cities and are gamely taking the fight to a force multiple times as big and strong (on paper).

As should be clear by now, Francis Fukuyama’s declaration in The End of History: The Last Man (1992) that we had arrived at “the end of history” did not mean that classical liberalism, or laissez-faire economics, had emerged victorious over communism and fascism, or that the final ideological hegemony signaled the end of socialism. In fact, for Fukuyama, the terminus of history was always democratic socialism or social democracy. As Hans-Hermann Hoppe noted in Democracy: The God That Failed, “the Last Man” standing was not a capitalist homo economicus but rather a “homo socio-democraticus” (222). The end of history, with all its Hegelian pretenses, did not entail the defeat of socialism-communism but rather of classical liberalism. Evidently, the big state and big capital were supposed to have reached an inevitable and final détente. The Great Reset is the consummation of this final détente.