The Nuclear Chessboard: Rising Tests, Expanding Arsenals, Eroding Restraint – Analysis

December 3, 2025 
Observer Research Foundation
By Manoj Joshi

Perhaps the most alarming development amidst the swirl of wars and crises, be it Ukraine and Russia, Gaza and Israel, Iran-Israel, India and Pakistan, Thailand and Cambodia, Ethiopia and Eritrea and Sudan, is the reinsertion of the nuclear weapon factor in global concerns.

Since the launch of its invasion of Ukraine, Russia has repeatedly brandished the nuclear threat to warn off the West. More recently, Russian President Vladimir Putin boasted of successful tests of a new nuclear-powered and nuclear-armed Burevestnik missile, as well as of a nuclear-weapon-armed Poseidon underwater drone.

Shortly thereafter, United States (US) President Donald Trump announced that his country had decided to renew testing of nuclear weapons, which is a decision that could end a moratorium that has lasted over 30 years. Days later, Putin said that if the US resumed testing, Russia, too, would follow suit. The US has observed a voluntary moratorium on nuclear testing since 1992, though it has maintained the ability to resume the tests.

What Trump meant by this announcement remains ambiguous. Specialists say that four different types of activities could be on the table. The first is a straightforward explosive test, which would result in a seismic yield and can be easily detected by the global network of seismic stations. The second is a super-critical test in which a self-sustaining chain reaction is created, but may not yield a seismic result. A third is a subcritical test, which is conducted routinely, in which nuclear powers ensure the reliability of their arsenals through lasers and supercomputers, such as those the US has in its National Ignition Facility and China has at its Mianyang facility. The fourth is, of course, the testing of nuclear delivery systems.

The United States has accused China and Russia of conducting “supercritical” hydronuclear tests, which it argues would violate the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) because such tests involve a self-sustaining fission chain reaction and therefore constitute nuclear explosions under the treaty’s definition. The CTBT has been signed by 187 states and ratified by 178, but it has not entered into force because several of the 44 Annex-II states required for entry into force—including India, Pakistan, and North Korea, none of which have signed the treaty—have not completed the necessary ratification procedures.


The Expanding Chinese Arsenal

Nevertheless, other issues are crowding the nuclear table. Since 2020, China has more than doubled its nuclear arsenal to around 600 warheads and is adding roughly 100 warheads each year. By the beginning of 2025, China had more or less completed 350 new Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) silos in three large fields in the northern desert part of the country and three in the mountainous areas of the east. There are nearly as many silos as in the US. The Chinese have so far not acknowledged these changes, but they have spoken of the need for a “strategic counterbalance”.

Both Allies and Adversaries on Edge

Another issue comprises nervous allies spooked by the Trump administration’s unclear alliance policy, with a president who may now be contemplating crossing the nuclear threshold. Among these could be counted countries such as South Korea, Japan, Poland, and Germany. Iran is recovering from the destruction of its nuclear facilities and is no doubt contemplating continuing its programme.

Ukraine’s plight is bound to focus minds. The country gave up its nuclear weapons in exchange for guarantees from the five declared nuclear-weapon powers. The guarantors agreed not to use military force or coercion against countries like Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan, which surrendered their nuclear weapons in 1994 following the dissolution of the erstwhile Soviet Union.

Though the US and Russia have a total inventory of over 5,000 and a deployed inventory of 1,700 nuclear weapons each, they were essentially intended to be used against each other in the event of a nuclear war. However, the US is now confronting the growth of the Chinese arsenal and deliberating whether its own arsenal is expansive enough. Concurrently, it also has to worry about new Russian delivery systems. A Congressional Commission recommended in 2023 that the US expand its nuclear arsenal because of the Chinese buildup.

As of now, both Russia and the United States continue to abide by the New START Treaty, which expires in February 2026. Given the recent dismal record of arms-control agreements, there is little hope that the treaty will be renewed. China, for its part, has made clear that it is not interested in arms-control negotiations, as it seeks to catch up with the nuclear capabilities of Russia and the United States.

Islamabad’s Command Shake-up

Yet another development bears concerns for India. This is the passage of the 27th constitutional amendment in Pakistan, which has given exclusive control of the Pakistani nuclear arsenal to Field Marshal Asim Munir. The Nuclear Command Authority (NCA) was created in 2000, headed by the prime minister, and comprised the three service chiefs and the chairman of the Chief of Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee (CJCSC). Now, the office of the CJCSC has been abolished. Asim Munir is not only the army chief but also, in his new role as Chief of Defence Forces (CDF), outranks the other service chiefs and will recommend the commander to lead Pakistan’s newly created National Strategic Command, which has replaced the NCA. In essence, this arrangement concentrates the authority over nuclear use in a single unelected leader.

As is well known, Pakistani nuclear weapons are “India-centric”. Islamabad has adopted a “first use” doctrine which it says caters to “full spectrum deterrence” using strategic and tactical nuclear weapons for a range of contingencies — such as the loss of significant territory in a war with India, destruction of a large portion of its land or air forces, the strangulation of its economy, or the destabilisation of the Pakistani political system.
The Golden Dome Gamble

At Trump’s instance, the US is working on the Golden Dome missile defence project that would include space-based sensors and attack satellites. However, specialists argue that this could actually give a fillip to a new arms race. The threat of mutual destruction has held the nuclear peace since the beginning of the nuclear age. The effort to create a shield could negate this logic, as adversaries will try to circumvent or defeat the new capabilities. This could involve new and more missiles, decoys, and delivery systems, such as underwater autonomous torpedoes, much like the Poseidon.

Arms Control in Crisis

Earlier this month, Trump said that he was “working on a plan to denuclearize” with China, Russia, and the US. This was a passing reference, and only a few details are known. The problem is that at this stage, arms control efforts have not just ground to a halt, but there has been a steady demise of treaties once signed between the US and Russia.

Trump has been speaking of nuclear talks for quite some time. In 2020, he tried and failed to launch three-way talks involving China, Russia, and the US. Shortly after becoming president, he told the World Economic Forum that vast amounts of money were being spent on the destructive capabilities of nuclear weapons, and no one wanted to talk about it. “So we want to see if we can denuclearize, and I think that’s very possible.”

Russia’s immediate response was that it wanted to resume arms control talks as soon as possible. Dimitry Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, said that such negotiations were in the interests of the world and both countries, but he added that the ball was in America’s court.

Status of Arms Control Agreements

Treaty name	Status 2025	Notes
INF Treaty	Dead	Both the US and Russia withdrew in 2019
CFE Treaty	Dead	Russia withdrew (Nov 2023), North Atlantic Treaty Organization suspended its obligations
Open Skies Treaty	Dead	Both the US and Russia withdrew in 2020-21
ABM Treaty	Dead	The US withdrew in 2002
New START	Suspended (by Russia)	Russia suspended in Feb 2023, not withdrawn. But the treaty expires in February 2026
CTBT	De-ratified (Russia)	Russia did so, citing the US’s lack of ratification
Vienna Document	Dead/Not functional	Russia stopped cooperation in March 2023

Source: Compiled by the author

However, the Chinese have been quite categorical that they will not participate in any denuclearisation efforts. The Chinese spokeswoman Mao Ning said in response to a question following Trump’s denuclearisation claim that “China’s nuclear forces are not on the same scale as those of the US and Russia; it would be unfair, unreasonable, and impractical at this stage to require China to join nuclear arms control talks.”

Clearly, in the current political climate, the prospects for arms talks are dim, while momentum appears to favour forces that are stoking a new arms race. 

About the author: Manoj Joshi is a Distinguished Fellow at the Observer Research Foundation.

Source: This article was published by the Observer Research Foundation.


Observer Research Foundation

ORF was established on 5 September 1990 as a private, not for profit, ’think tank’ to influence public policy formulation. The Foundation brought together, for the first time, leading Indian economists and policymakers to present An Agenda for Economic Reforms in India. The idea was to help develop a consensus in favour of economic reforms.

Theatre’s ‘Timid Libertarian’ – OpEd

Tom Stoppard on a reception in honour of the premiere of ‘The Coast of Utopia’ in Russia | Credit: Участник, Wikimedia Commons

December 3, 2025

FEE
By Diogo Costa

Tom Stoppard died on Saturday, November 29th, at 88. Some would call him a scholar’s playwright, due to his allusions and philosophical meditations. When my friend Pedro Sette-Câmara introduced me to his work, I was pursuing graduate studies in New York. The Coast of Utopia was premiering at Lincoln Center, and I couldn’t find an affordable ticket to see it. Instead, I read his trilogy in book format.

Partially because of my studies in political philosophy at the time, I started to see in his work the themes related to human freedom and human knowledge, as well as the forces that threaten them.

The Coast of Utopia is, in many ways, a dramatic rendering of Isaiah Berlin’s Russian Thinkers, a collection of essays on Alexander Herzen, Mikhail Bakunin, Vissarion Belinsky, and Ivan Turgenev that constitutes a meditation on the birth of the Russian intelligentsia. I was reading Berlin at the time I read Stoppard, and I found in his writing Berlin’s intellectual history made flesh. Later I saw that Stoppard acknowledged his debt explicitly: “Isaiah Berlin is an author without whom I could not have written these plays.”

What Stoppard found in Isaiah Berlin was a framework for understanding freedom that cut against the grain of revolutionary idealism. Berlin drew a famous distinction between negative and positive liberty: freedom from interference versus freedom to achieve some higher self or collective goal. In The Coast of Utopia, Bakunin dreams of a freedom that will arrive after the revolution, when the old order has been swept away and humanity can finally become what it was always meant to be. Herzen, by contrast, insists on freedom as it can be lived now, in the present, by actual people with their actual desires and limitations.

Stoppard saw that the concept of positive liberty, however noble in aspiration, can be twisted into its opposite. If true freedom means realizing your “higher” self, then those who claim to know what your higher self requires can justify coercing you in the name of liberation. The revolutionary who forces you to be free speaks as if he is liberating while conscripting you into someone else’s vision of the good. Berlin saw this logic at work in Soviet communism, in fascism, in every system that sacrificed present human beings for the sake of an imagined future perfection.



As Stoppard later put it, “positive freedom in the USSR meant empty shops, rubbish goods and rubbish lives for millions, but that was not the point for me, that was not the dystopia. The horror was the loss of personal responsibility, of personal space in the head, the loss of autonomy, of the freedom to move freely, and the ultimate Orwellian nightmare which is not to know what you have lost.”

Herzen’s From the Other Shore, written after the crushing of the 1848 revolutions, gave Berlin and Stoppard the language to articulate this critique. “If progress is the goal,” Herzen asked, “for whom are we working? Do you truly wish to condemn the human beings alive today to the sad role of caryatids supporting a floor for others some day to dance on?” The one thing we can be sure of is the reality of the sacrifice, the dying and the dead.

“Life’s bounty is in its flow,” wrote Stoppard through Herzen’s mouth. “Later is too late. Where is the song when it’s been sung? The dance when it’s been danced?”

Stoppard asks these questions in one of his most beautiful passages in Coast of Utopia. Herzen watches his son Kolya die and reflects on what it means to love something that will not last: “Because children grow up, we think a child’s purpose is to grow up. But a child’s purpose is to be a child. Nature doesn’t disdain what only lives for a day. It pours the whole of itself into each moment. We don’t value the lily less for not being made of flint and built to last.”

The utilitarian case for liberty—that it produces better outcomes, more prosperity, greater innovation—is true but incomplete. Freedom is valuable in itself, as an expression of human dignity, as the necessary condition for a present and meaningful life. “It’s only we humans who want to own the future, too.”

Stoppard presented an existential view of freedom. Freedom is not merely an instrumental means to something else. It is a constitutive part of what it means to be a human mind that thinks and acts in the world. This is why free people do not have to be politically motivated to threaten a totalitarian system. They just need to act and think as free people.

Stoppard returned again and again to artists, intellectuals, and dissidents as his protagonists. In Rock ’n’ Roll, set across the decades of Czechoslovak communism, the character of Jan insists that listening to the band the Plastic People of the Universe is not a political act. The authorities had a different understanding. A band playing music they want to play, for an audience that wants to hear it, outside the structures of state approval is intolerable precisely because it is not political. It is simply free. As Stoppard himself explained: “They’re not actually ideological, they just want to play their music and they don’t care about communism or anti-communism—they’re musicians, artists, pagans. The police resent them because they don’t care.”

This indifference is their power and their peril. At some point, the regime wants to make concessions to their performance, but in exchange asks them to cut their long hair. They agree to what sounds like a trivial concession. Then they are asked to soften a lyric, to make one small compromise after another. The cumulative effect is surrender. This is the road to serfdom as lived experience.

The totalitarian worlds that haunted Stoppard were not abstract to him. Born Tomáš Sträussler in Czechoslovakia in 1937, he fled the Nazi invasion as an infant. His father died when the Japanese bombed his ship fleeing Singapore. His mother remarried a British army major, and Tomáš became Tom. He later described himself as a “bounced Czech” who “put on Englishness like a coat.”

His biography gave Stoppard something that theoretical defenders of liberty often lack: the personal knowledge of what it means when freedom fails. Relatives of his had died in concentration camps, and he did not learn their names until he was in his fifties. He visited Prague in 1977 to meet Václav Havel and other dissidents. He wrote about Havel’s trial along with three other Chartists, noting the Kafkaesque absurdity of one of the charges: “damaging the name of the state abroad.” The show trial, he observed, was “not good theatre” because the puppets kept showing their strings.

Stoppard called himself a “timid libertarian.” He distrusted grand ideological pronouncements, having seen where they led in the 20th century. Instead, he explored freedom’s stakes through worlds that are simultaneously fantastic, deeply personal, and tragically incomplete. As he spoke while accepting the PEN/Allen Foundation Literary Service Award: “You kind of stand there in your Western idea of what morality is and what amorality is and suddenly you’re not quite sure. You thought you’d always known what was which and suddenly, you’re not sure. This is the fate of thoughtful people as the century unfolds.”

That uncertainty and epistemic humility is part of a fully human life. Questioning one’s reality was an idea that Stoppard returned to, through the frame of theatrical performance, from his early breakout work, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1966), to The Real Inspector Hound (1968) and The Real Thing (1982). In each play, the characters (and the audience) are challenged on what is real. To live among unanswered questions, rival interpretations, and half-finished conversations is not a regrettable price we pay for better theories. It is the atmosphere in which free and rational animals live and breathe.

In Stoppard’s Arcadia, Thomasina Coverly, a mathematical prodigy of thirteen, weeps for the burning of the Library of Alexandria, and all the knowledge that was lost with it. Her tutor Septimus consoles her: “We shed as we pick up, like travelers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind.”

Septimus’s consolation is also Stoppard’s epistemology. Knowledge is not a treasure locked in a single vault, vulnerable to any barbarian with a torch. It is dispersed across countless minds, rediscovered in countless contexts, carried forward through the unpredictable conversations of free people thinking aloud. The march of open societies is a distribution of intellectual risk, a world where no single fire can consume what humanity knows. As long as we keep thinking and talking, reading and writing, singing and dancing, truth will reveal itself again and again. This is why totalitarianism must control not just the state but the human soul, and why the dissident who simply insists on freely thinking his own thoughts poses such a threat.

Stoppard taught me that, in the political community, freedom and knowledge are not separate domains, nor are they abstract ideals reserved for a utopian future; they are things to be practiced now, amidst the mess and noise of the living. And now the playwright himself has become one of Septimus’s travelers, letting fall what we who follow will pick up.

About the author: Diogo Costa is the President of the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE). He holds a bachelor’s degree in Law from the Catholic University of Petrópolis and a master’s degree in Political Science from Columbia University.
Source: This article was published by FEE


FEE

The Foundation for Economic Education's (FEE) mission is to inspire, educate, and connect future leaders with the economic, ethical, and legal principles of a free society. These principles include: individual liberty, free-market economics, entrepreneurship, private property, high moral character, and limited government. FEE is a tax-exempt, 501(c)3 educational foundation

MANY OF AMERICAS RIGHT WING CONSERVATIVE LIBERTARIANS (ANARCHO-CAPITALISTS) ARE UNAPOLOGETIC CATHOLICS

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for LIBERALTARIANS

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for STATELESS SOCIALISM

Why America Is Removing Thousands Of Dams And Letting Rivers Run Free – OpEd

The 2024 removal of the Iron Gate Dam, part of the Klamath River restoration, the largest dam removal project in history. Photo Credit: Bob Pagliuco / NOAA Office of Habitat Conservation, Wikipedia Commons

December 3, 2025 

By Tara Lohan

After centuries of dam building, a nationwide movement to dismantle these aging barriers is showing how free-flowing rivers can restore ecosystems, improve safety, and reconnect people with nature.

With more than 550,000 dams in the United States, free-flowing rivers are an endangered species. We’ve dammed, diked, and diverted almost every major river in the country, straightening curves, pinching off floodplains, and blocking passage for fish and other aquatic animals. But this has come at a great cost. Freshwater biodiversity—all the organisms that hail from our rivers, streams, lakes, and wetlands—is among the most threatened on the planet. Dams have played a big role in that demise, pushing fish, mussels, and other animals to the brink, and some over it. In North America, nearly 40 percent of fish are imperiled, and 61 species have blinked out since 1900.

A growing dam removal movement has led to some 2,200 dams being blasted and backhoed from U.S. rivers—most of them in the past 25 years. It’s an extraordinary turn of events for a dam-loving country. Europeans began erecting river barriers soon after they arrived in North America. Massachusetts’s Old Oaken Bucket Pond Dam, built in 1640, is one of the country’s oldest known dams. Thousands more followed across New England, then down the East Coast, and eventually westward. They powered mills that ground corn, cut lumber, forged tack, and produced textiles. As dams raised the height of the water behind them, they also smothered rapids and white water so that logs could be floated from upstream forests—where they were felled—to downstream industry, where they were processed. After hydroelectric power replaced mechanical power in the 1880s, the dams kept towns and cities alight.

As dam building pushed westward, dam heights pushed skyward. Hoover Dam, built in the 1930s with the labor of 21,000 men, sits 726 feet high and more than 1,200 feet long—more a fortress than infrastructure. Grand Coulee Dam on the Columbia River in Washington rises to 550 feet and stretches nearly a mile long. The United States emerged from the Great Depression into a dam-building frenzy that lasted more than 30 years, dubbed the “go-go years” by Marc Reisner in Cadillac Desert, his iconic book on western water. Between 1950 and 1979, approximately 1,700 dams were built each year.

The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, which built many of the country’s mammoth dams and reengineered its rivers, had a motto: “Our rivers: total use for greater wealth.” Millions of Americans cashed in on the boom, often without giving it a thought. Politicians and regulators championed dams for their power, flood control, water storage, and recreational potential. Indeed, dams shaped the architecture of the West, irrigating millions of arid acres to grow crops for people and livestock, corralling drinking water for cities hundreds of miles away, churning the engines of war to create aluminum for fighter planes and plutonium for bombs, and turning valleys and canyons into giant swimming pools for our amusement.

Woody Guthrie captured the sentiment of those years in his 1941 song “Grand Coulee Dam,” which refers to the Columbia River as a “wild and wasted stream.” Wasted until it was dammed, that is. The folksinger, spurred by a government paycheck for his efforts, penned 26 songs espousing the virtues of the Columbia River’s dams. That sentiment was also a natural extension of an ethos brought to the Americas by European colonists: Nature should be harnessed, subjugated, bent to the will of those manifesting their destiny. Along the way, any impact on fish and river health was either poorly understood or simply ignored. Often the latter. Also ignored were obligations to tribes that had treaty rights to fish rivers that were quickly becoming empty of fish.



For most Indigenous people, dams didn’t bring enrichment or progress; it was one more theft from the enduring process of colonization in which food, community, ceremony, and sovereignty were stolen. Barry McCovey Jr., a member of the Yurok Tribe in California, called the dams on the Klamath River, where his people reside, “cultural genocide.” Dams have swallowed creation sites, burial grounds, gathering places, fishing holes, homelands, and human history.

In the 1990s, then-Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt reflected that we have been building, on average, one large dam a day every day since the Declaration of Independence. It hasn’t been without ecological consequences either. Dams have decimated migratory fish populations by blocking their access to vital upstream habitat for spawning, feeding, and evading predators. The barriers also obstruct the downstream movement of sediment and nutrients, thus depleting riverbanks and coastal beaches, hastening erosion, and reducing the growth of riverside plants that feed insects, birds, and other animals.

The water that backs up behind a dam—its impoundment—turns a river into an unnatural lake. Migrating young salmon that once quickly rode spring freshets to the ocean must now navigate slow-moving water over a wide expanse, which takes more energy and increases the chances that they’ll end up as dinner to a hungry predator, of which there are many if you’re a tiny fish. And that’s all before they have to run the turbine gauntlet and face the drop from the dam’s height to the water below. The slack water in an impoundment behind the dam can also heat up, turning these reservoirs into bathtubs with lethal temperatures for some fish. The warm water can also spur the spread of invasive species that prey on native residents.

Dams upend so many natural processes that it could be argued a river dammed isn’t really a river at all. It’s also possible that many of us don’t remember how a free-flowing river really looks and sounds. Dam removals can help restore not just river function but our collective memory, and I think we’ll need to do a lot more of it. The U.S. dam-building flurry hit its peak in the 1970s, and since 2000, we’ve been taking down more dams than we’ve been building. But the dam removal movement didn’t happen spontaneously. It was fought for by tribes, conservationists, fishers, and eventually broad, somewhat unlikely coalitions. It was also aided by environmental laws that protect clean water and endangered species, by scientific studies of dam removals and their impacts, and by regulators willing to manage adaptively.

Many people may see removing dams as outlandish. After all, they provide clean, cheap energy, right? But it turns out that only 3 percent of dams produce hydropower. Although hydropower is often placed in the “clean energy” column, dams and reservoirs also produce greenhouse gases, such as methane, and some do so to a significant degree.

Climate change poses yet more challenges. In drought-plagued regions, such as the Colorado River Basin, very little water can leave major reservoirs too low to produce hydropower or deliver water supplies. On the flip side, many dams today aren’t designed to withstand climate-amplified storms, which are increasing in frequency and severity, can threaten public safety, and may leave big cleanup bills. A big storm in 2023 put Montpelier, Vermont, underwater, and experts found that dams actually made the flooding worse.

There are many compelling environmental reasons to remove dams—including the long list of ecological consequences given above—but public safety is also paramount. The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) gave the nation’s dam safety a “D” grade in 2021. Until 2019, there were more than 15,000 “high-hazard” dams, where a failure would result in the loss of life. And there’s ample reason to be worried. The average age of our dams is 57 years, and more than 8,000 have surpassed 90 years. Aging dams require regular maintenance to ensure their safety, but this comes at a significant cost. As of 2024, $165 billion was required to rehabilitate all nonfederal dams in need of repair, and another $27 billion was needed for federal dams, according to the ASCE 2021 report.

Dams also don’t have to fail to be dangerous. At U.S. low-head dams, many only a few feet tall, some 1,400 people have drowned because of the unseen and unsafe hydraulics that these dams produce. The 6-foot-tall Dock Street Dam in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, has taken 31 lives between 1913 and April 2025.

Of course, many of our dams serve critical purposes, and I’ve yet to meet a dam removal advocate who thinks that they should all come down. I certainly don’t. But there’s no shortage of low-hanging fruit when it comes to dams worthy of demolition. Tens of thousands of dams—in some states, the majority of dams obstructing rivers and streams—no longer serve a useful purpose. These so-called deadbeat dams include mill dams, where the mills are decades (or centuries) gone, and obsolete dams, such as the 168-foot-tall Matilija Dam in Southern California, which was built for water storage but filled with silt in just 50 years. Some dams are orphans, with no known owner and therefore no one overseeing their upkeep. In many cases, it’s cheaper to take down dams than to refurbish and retrofit them to meet modern safety and environmental laws.

Dam removals can also be a necessary step toward ameliorating harm to Indigenous communities from the loss of food sovereignty, treaty rights, cultural resources, and homelands. More people are now realizing the benefits of restoring nature for nature’s sake—for the bears, birds, and beavers. For the salmon and cedars. Certainly, that’s been the case on the Elwha River in Washington state. People also benefit from ecological restoration. Over the last few decades, we’ve started to better account for what healthy rivers provide. These ecosystem services have helped put a value on something invaluable.

These days, we’re still building dams, although fewer than before, which is a step in the right direction. But to undo centuries of environmental harm, we’ll need bigger leaps.

American Rivers has set an ambitious goal to work with partners to remove30,000 dams and open up 300,000 river miles by 2050. That work is aided by aquatic connectivity teams now operating in 26 states and counting. There are also some other unlikely partners, such as the hydropower industry, although it’s not a booster of every project.

“It has really come down to safety and economics. They’re electing to take out their lower-performing assets,” Brian Graber, senior director of River Restoration at American Rivers, told me. “There are many more dam owners who want to remove dams, and so trade groups, like the National Hydropower Association, are no longer adversaries.”

Opening up rivers, I think, opens up a door of possibilities both for fish and people. It allows us to reimagine how to grow food without emptying rivers of life, how to generate clean energy without driving extinction, and how to move forward without leaving part of the community behind. We can be better neighbors to each other, but also better people on this planet.

Author Bio: Tara Lohan has been a professional environmental journalist and editor for more than 15 years. Her work has been published in the Nation, the American Prospect, Salon, High Country News, Grist, the Revelator, Adventure Journal, and other news outlets. She is the editor of two books on the global water crisis and, most recently, Undammed: Freeing Rivers and Bringing Communities to Life (Island Press, 2025).

Credit Line: This excerpt is adapted from Tara Lohan’s Undammed: Freeing Rivers and Bringing Communities to Life (2025, Island Press). It is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) with permission from Island Press. It was produced for the web by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Digital Sovereignty Diplomacy: Structural Challenges For Small States In The Technological Era – Analysis

December 3, 2025 
IFIMES
By Amb. Assoc. Prof. Dr. Arben Cici

In the past decade, the concept of digital sovereignty has become one of the most debated and contested themes in contemporary foreign policy, challenging classical models of state authority. In a world where power is no longer solely territorial but increasingly infrastructural, technological, and algorithmic, states face the paradox of a digital space that belongs simultaneously to everyone and to no one. While traditional diplomacy operates through well-defined borders, the internet and global data ecosystems evolve beyond jurisdiction, making national control an increasingly elusive objective.

Within this context, digital sovereignty is not merely an issue of domestic regulation; it is a strategic dimension of foreign policy in which states attempt to safeguard their technological autonomy in a global arena dominated by transnational corporations, international standards designed by major powers, and infrastructural architectures that often lie outside their direct control.

1. Technological Dependence and the Global Architecture of Critical Infrastructures Controlled by Foreign Actors

The global digital infrastructure, from intercontinental submarine cables to 5G networks, data centers, and cloud services, is built and governed by a limited number of powerful transnational corporations. For small states, this concentrated control creates a multidimensional dependence:technical (ownership and design of technology),
financial (costs of access and maintenance), and
political (strategic influence exercised by corporations and their states of origin).

Most small states, including those in the Western Balkans, lack the financial resources and technical expertise to develop sustainable domestic alternatives. Building an advanced data center or a secure national cloud infrastructure requires investment and specialized know-how that exceed the capacity of many small economies (UNCTAD, 2021). As a result, they become “strategic consumers” of global technologies, negotiating terms of access, security, and interoperability within systems whose rules they do not set.

For Albania and similar states, this poses a fundamental dilemma: how can a country preserve domestic control over its digital ecosystem when the technical backbone lies outside its jurisdiction?


2. Global Standardization as a Form of Structural Power: The “Invisible Tyrannies” of the Digital Age

International standards, protocols, data formats, security architectures, and interoperability requirements are far more than technical guidelines; they are mechanisms of structural power in the digital order. These standards determine not only how the internet operates, but also the shape of digital space and the boundaries of national sovereignty.

Small states rarely participate in the early stages of standard-setting, where the real negotiation of technological power occurs. Consequently, they must adopt standards formulated by the United States, China, the European Union, or major technology companies, otherwise they risk exclusion from the global digital economy.

Even the EU, despite its regulatory power, often faces constraints and delays because many foundational digital standards originate from U.S. Big Tech. This means that even major actors depend on private companies, while small states depend on them even more profoundly.

Thus, the “tyranny of standards” translates into operational dependency, high transition costs, and structural disadvantages for small states, which often face only two options: accept the standards or fall out of the global system.

3. Cross-Border Data Flows and the Weakening of National Jurisdiction: Sovereignty in the Age of Digital Extraterritoriality

In an interconnected digital world, data travels across borders at accelerated and decentralized rates. Yet the laws governing these flows are asymmetrical, with larger states applying extraterritorial jurisdiction that grants them access to data stored beyond their physical territory.

Legislation such as the U.S. CLOUD Act, and comparable frameworks in China and India, creates a reality in which the physical location of a server no longer defines legal control. This challenges the classical principle of territorial sovereignty. For small states, this means diminished capacity to control the data of their citizens and institutions, particularly when cloud infrastructures are foreign-owned.

The result is a tension between the national interest in security and autonomy and the economic need for interoperability, investment, and technological integration.

Albania, like many small states, stands precisely between these pressures: seeking normative sovereignty while simultaneously requiring access to global data networks.

4. Global Supply Chains in Advanced Technologies: Structural Fragility and the Risk of Falling Behind

Advanced technologies, microchips, optical equipment, sensors, high-performance servers, are produced through geographically dispersed supply chains involving hundreds of suppliers. Even major powers such as the United States and China do not control the entire production cycle.

For small states, this reality means technological autarky is impossible. Security of supply depends on geopolitical dynamics, and delays in access to advanced technologies can generate irreversible developmental gaps.

If a small state cannot access next-generation equipment, such as advanced 5G modules, it cannot develop the economic and security services of the future, effectively positioning itself on the periphery of the global digital economy.

5. The Gap Between Technological Innovation and Diplomatic-Regulatory Capacity: The Dilemmas of Openness and Closure

The rapid growth of artificial intelligence, autonomous systems, simulation technologies, and advanced data analytics is surpassing the regulatory capacities of most states. Small states, with more limited administrations and technical expertise, are particularly exposed.

They face a structural dilemma:If they close their systems, they risk technological backwardness and exclusion from global competition.
If they open without safeguards, they become vulnerable to external influence, data extraction, and strategic dependency.

This persistent gap between innovation and regulation is generating a new geopolitical asymmetry in which small states are more often policy-takers than policy-shapers—a condition that reduces their influence in technological diplomacy.

6. The Technological Diplomacy of Small States: Between Strategic Survival and Projection of Influence

In the digital era, diplomacy is no longer solely political negotiation; it requires engagement in technical forums, participation in standard-setting organizations, and the building of alliances around emerging technologies. Small states such as Albania can gain disproportionate influence by specializing in selected fields (e.g., cyber security), taking leadership roles in regional initiatives, and coordinating their positions within multilateral frameworks such as NATO and the EU.

The Baltic model, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, demonstrates that small states can become significant actors in digital diplomacy if they invest in technical capacity and pursue clear, long-term digital transformation strategies.
7. Digital Sovereignty for Small States: Strategies of Resilience and Alternative Governance Models

Digital sovereignty is not only about technical protection; it is the capacity of a state to exercise political, legal, and economic control over the systems that sustain society. For small states, the challenge lies in developing national cyber-security strategies, public digital platforms, open-source governance models, and shared regional infrastructures for data management.

For Albania and the Western Balkans, such an approach could increase technological autonomy, reduce dependency on external networks, and create a new area of regional cooperation, potentially evolving into a “Western Balkans Digital Commons.”
Foreign Policy as a Tool for Reclaiming Sovereignty

While the classical notion of absolute sovereignty has become practically unattainable in an interconnected digital era, states can still construct a form of strategic sovereignty that does not aspire to isolation, but rather to building the capacity to exert effective control over critical sectors. This new form of sovereignty is shaped through technological diplomacy, targeted investment, and smart regulation, allowing even small states to project influence beyond their traditional geopolitical weight. In this sense, foreign policy becomes the primary instrument for reducing structural dependencies and preserving functional autonomy within a technologically fragmented international order.

1. Technological Diplomacy and Thematic Alliances

Just as NATO’s collective security architecture underpinned the Euro-Atlantic order in the industrial age, digital power today requires new forms of cooperation, because no state, even major powers, can guarantee technological security in isolation. Technological diplomacy extends the domain of classical diplomacy: negotiations increasingly concern AI standards, cross-border data flows, cybersecurity protocols, and the governance of global platforms, not only borders, trade, or defense.

For small states, which often formulate foreign policy under conditions of limited institutional and technical capacity, thematic alliances function as a force multiplier. By joining regional blocs, such states gain negotiating power they would not possess individually. This explains why the European Union has become one of the most influential actors in technological diplomacy: despite internal diversity, its member states, some of them very small, such as Estonia, Finland, or Ireland, exercise disproportionate influence in areas like cybersecurity, digital governance, and international standard-setting.

For countries such as Albania, active participation in international forums, NATO’s Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence, the European Union Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA), ISO/IEC standard committees, is the most effective way to contribute to rule-making processes. Thus, thematic diplomacy requires a shift from a reactive posture to a proactive one, in which the state not only adapts but also shapes the digital global environment.

2. Investing in Key Points of Technological Autonomy

In a world where technological development outpaces the budgetary capacities of most states, the smart strategy is not to build everything, but to choose the right battles. Technological autonomy does not require creating a full national ecosystem—an unrealistic objective even for many advanced economies—but identifying the critical areas where the state must retain direct control.

These include:Sovereign cloud infrastructures for public and sensitive data;
Secure communications for state institutions;
Public-sector ai systems for administration, crisis management, and governance;
Strategic digital platforms that reduce dependency on foreign vendors.

Small states that have followed this model—such as Estonia with its digital government ecosystem or Iceland with its advanced data-center infrastructure—have been able to balance global integration with the protection of a sovereign core capable of resisting the vulnerabilities of extreme interdependence. Such an approach strengthens state resilience without jeopardizing openness to international cooperation, making it particularly suitable for the Western Balkans.

3. Regulation as an Instrument of Soft Power

The digital age has transformed how states exert influence. Instead of traditional tools of foreign policy, regulation has emerged as a new instrument of soft power. The European Union illustrates this transformation most clearly: through legal frameworks such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the Digital Services Act (DSA) and the Digital Markets Act (DMA), the EU has established global standards that multinational corporations and third countries must adopt if they wish to access the European market.

These regulations create a powerful ripple effect:They increase algorithmic transparency;
Impose strict obligations regarding data protection;
Balance the dominance of digital platforms;
Extend the eu’s technological jurisdiction beyond its borders.

This regulatory model has transformed the EU into a diplomatic actor that exerts influence through norms, not only through economic strength or military power. For small states, adopting or aligning with such frameworks is not merely a matter of harmonization: it is a strategy to keep pace with global developments, protect citizens’ rights, and enhance their international credibility.

4. Human Capital as the Foundation of Sovereignty

Ultimately, digital sovereignty is not defined by networks, servers, or protocols—but by the people who know how to build, manage, and secure them. Technological sovereignty requires a new class of experts in:Artificial intelligence;
Cybersecurity and digital forensics;
International standardization;
Technological law and ethics;
Data-driven diplomacy;
Responsibility and accountability.

Without strong human capital, regulation remains formal, strategy remains theoretical, and technological diplomacy remains symbolic. For small states, investing in scientific education, innovation laboratories, digital diplomacy training, and international exchange programs is the most sustainable means of reclaiming control. This is why many successful small economies—such as Estonia, Israel, and Singapore—place human capital at the center of both their development strategies and their foreign-policy agendas.
Conclusions for Foreign Policy

The analysis of digital sovereignty challenges demonstrates that twenty-first-century foreign policy is shifting away from traditional diplomacy toward a more complex architecture in which technological infrastructures, global standards, data flows, and regulatory capacities are deeply interconnected. For small states—including Albania and those of the Western Balkans—these dynamics generate not only structural vulnerabilities but also new opportunities for strategic positioning, provided they develop technical expertise, build multilateral alliances, and specialize in areas where they can project influence beyond their demographic or economic weight.

In a global system defined by intensifying technological competition among major powers, small states must move from defensive postures to a proactive diplomacy of digital sovereignty. Participation in international standard-setting bodies, regional cohesion, investments in cyber-security, and alignment with EU and NATO frameworks become essential instruments of empowerment. This suggests that the future of foreign policy will no longer be determined solely by classical geopolitical relations but increasingly by the ability of states to preserve technological autonomy and to build resilient architectures of digital governance that secure development, integration, and long-term stability in the international order.

In this sense, diplomacy in the twenty-first century is not only the art of negotiation, but also the art of knowledge, where national expertise becomes an essential resource for defending state interests and strengthening strategic autonomy.

About the author: Ambassador Assoc. Prof. Dr. Arben Cici, currently lecturer of International Relations at Mediterranean University of Albania, former Ambassador of Albania to Denmark, Croatia, Russia, twice Advisor for the Foreign Policy of the President of the Republic, twice Director of the State Protocol at the Ministry of foreign Affairs, author of the Official Ceremonial of the Republic of Albania, analyst and excellent expert on the foreign policy.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect IFIMES official position.

IFIMES

IFIMES – International Institute for Middle-East and Balkan studies, based in Ljubljana, Slovenia, has special consultative status with the Economic and Social Council ECOSOC/UN since 2018. IFIMES is also the publisher of the biannual international scientific journal European Perspectives. IFIMES gathers and selects various information and sources on key conflict areas in the world. The Institute analyses mutual relations among parties with an aim to promote the importance of reconciliation, early prevention/preventive diplomacy and disarmament/ confidence building measures in the regional or global conflict resolution of the existing conflicts and the role of preventive actions against new global disputes.