What It Will Mean for the World When Machines Shape Strategy and Statecraft
By Henry A. Kissinger, Eric Schmidt, and Craig Mundie,
October 2024,Nathan Howard / Reuters
From the recalibration of military strategy to the reconstitution of diplomacy, artificial intelligence will become a key determinant of order in the world. Immune to fear and favor, AI introduces a new possibility of objectivity in strategic decision-making. But that objectivity, harnessed by both the warfighter and the peacemaker, should preserve human subjectivity, which is essential for the responsible exercise of force. AI in war will illuminate the best and worst expressions of humanity. It will serve as the means both to wage war and to end it.
Humanity’s long-standing struggle to constitute itself in ever-more complex arrangements, so that no state gains absolute mastery over others, has achieved the status of a continuous, uninterrupted law of nature. In a world where the major actors are still human—even if equipped with AI to inform, consult, and advise them—countries should still enjoy a degree of stability based on shared norms of conduct, subject to the tunings and adjustments of time.
But if AI emerges as a practically independent political, diplomatic, and military set of entities, that would force the exchange of the age-old balance of power for a new, uncharted disequilibrium. The international concert of nation-states—a tenuous and shifting equilibrium achieved in the last few centuries—has held in part because of the inherent equality of the players. A world of severe asymmetry—for instance, if some states adopted AI at the highest level more readily than others—would be far less predictable. In cases where some humans might face off militarily or diplomatically against a highly AI-enabled state, or against AI itself, humans could struggle to survive, much less compete. Such an intermediate order could witness an internal implosion of societies and an uncontrollable explosion of external conflicts.
Other possibilities abound. Beyond seeking security, humans have long fought wars in pursuit of triumph or in defense of honor. Machines—for now—lack any conception of either triumph or honor. They may never go to war, choosing instead, for instance, immediate, carefully divided transfers of territory based on complex calculations. Or they might—prizing an outcome and deprioritizing individual lives—take actions that spiral into bloody wars of human attrition. In one scenario, our species could emerge so transformed as to avoid entirely the brutality of human conduct. In another, we would become so subjugated by the technology that it would drive us back to a barbaric past.
THE AI SECURITY DILEMMA
Many countries are fixated on how to “win the AI race.” In part, that drive is understandable. Culture, history, communication, and perception have conspired to create among today’s major powers a diplomatic situation that fosters insecurity and suspicion on all sides. Leaders believe that an incremental tactical advantage could be decisive in any future conflict, and that AI could offer just that advantage.
If each country wished to maximize its position, then the conditions would be set for a psychological contest among rival military forces and intelligence agencies the likes of which humanity has never faced before. An existential security dilemma awaits. The logical first wish for any human actor coming into possession of superintelligent AI—that is, a hypothetical AI more intelligent than a human—might be to attempt to guarantee that nobody else gains this powerful version of the technology. Any such actor might also reasonably assume by default that its rival, dogged by the same uncertainties and facing the same stakes, would be pondering a similar move.
Short of war, a superintelligent AI could subvert, undermine, and block a competing program. For instance, AI promises both to strengthen conventional computer viruses with unprecedented potency and to disguise them thoroughly. Like the computer worm Stuxnet—the cyberweapon uncovered in 2010 that was thought to have ruined a fifth of Iran’s uranium centrifuges—an AI agent could sabotage a rival’s progress in ways that obfuscate its presence, thereby forcing enemy scientists to chase shadows. With its unique capacity for manipulation of weaknesses in human psychology, an AI could also hijack a rival nation’s media, producing a deluge of synthetic disinformation so alarming as to inspire mass opposition against further progress in that country’s AI capacities.
It will be hard for countries to get a clear sense of where they stand relative to others in the AI race. Already the largest AI models are being trained on secure networks disconnected from the rest of the Internet. Some executives believe that AI development will itself sooner or later migrate to impenetrable bunkers whose supercomputers will be powered with nuclear reactors. Data centers are even now being built on the bottom of the ocean floor. Soon they could be sequestered in orbits around Earth. Corporations or countries might increasingly “go dark,” ceasing to publish AI research so as not only to avoid enabling malicious actors but also to obscure their own pace of development. To distort the true picture of their progress, others might even try deliberately publishing misleading research, with AI assisting in the creation of convincing fabrications.
AI in war will illuminate the best and worst expressions of humanity.
There is a precedent for such scientific subterfuge. In 1942, the Soviet physicist Georgy Flyorov correctly inferred that the United States was building a nuclear bomb after he noticed that the Americans and the British had suddenly stopped publishing scientific papers on atomic fission. Today, such a contest would be made all the more unpredictable given the complexity and ambiguity of measuring progress toward something so abstract as intelligence. Although some see advantage as commensurate with the size of the AI models in their possession, a larger model is not necessarily superior across all contexts and may not always prevail over smaller models deployed at scale. Smaller and more specialized AI machines might operate like a swarm of drones against an aircraft carrier—unable to destroy it, but sufficient to neutralize it.
An actor might be perceived to have an overall advantage were it to demonstrate achievement in a particular capability. The problem with this line of thinking, however, is that AI refers merely to a process of machine learning that is embedded not just in a single technology but also in a broad spectrum of technologies. Capability in any one area may thus be driven by factors entirely different from capability in another. In these senses, any “advantage” as ordinarily calculated may be illusory.
Moreover, as demonstrated by the exponential and unforeseen explosion of AI capability in recent years, the trajectory of progress is neither linear nor predictable. Even if one actor could be said to “lead” another by an approximate number of years or months, a sudden technical or theoretical breakthrough in a key area at a critical moment could invert the positions of all players.
In such a world, where no leaders could trust their most solid intelligence, their most primal instincts, or even the basis of reality itself, governments could not be blamed for acting from a position of maximum paranoia and suspicion. Leaders are no doubt already making decisions under the assumption that their endeavors are under surveillance or harbor distortions created by malign influence. Defaulting to worst-case scenarios, the strategic calculus of any actor at the frontier would be to prioritize speed and secrecy over safety. Human leaders could be gripped by the fear that there is no such thing as second place. Under pressure, they might prematurely accelerate the deployment of AI as deterrence against external disruption.
A NEW PARADIGM OF WAR
For almost all of human history, war has been fought in a defined space in which one could know with reasonable certainty the capability and position of hostile enemy forces. The combination of these two attributes offered each side a sense of psychological security and common consensus, allowing for the informed restraint of lethality. Only when enlightened leaders were unified in their basic understanding of how a war might be fought could opposing forces determine whether a war should be fought.
Speed and mobility have been among the most predictable factors underpinning the capability of any given piece of military equipment. An early illustration is the development of the cannon. For a millennium after their construction, the Theodosian Walls protected the great city of Constantinople from outside invaders. Then, in 1452, a Hungarian artillery engineer proposed to Emperor Constantine XI the construction of a giant cannon that, firing from behind the defensive walls, would pulverize attackers. But the complacent emperor, possessing neither the material means nor the foresight to recognize the technology’s significance, dismissed the proposal.
Unfortunately for him, the Hungarian engineer turned out to be a mercenary. Switching tactics (and sides), he updated his design to be more mobile—transportable by no fewer than 60 oxen and 400 men—and approached the emperor’s rival, the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II, who was preparing to besiege the impermeable fortress. Winning the young sultan’s interest with his claim that this gun could “shatter the walls of Babylon itself,” the entrepreneurial Hungarian helped the Turkish forces to breach the ancient walls in only 55 days.
The contours of this fifteenth-century drama can be seen again and again throughout history. In the nineteenth century, speed and mobility transformed the fortunes first of France, as Napoleon’s army overwhelmed Europe, and then of Prussia, under the direction of Helmuth von Moltke (the Elder) and Albrecht von Roon, who capitalized on the newly developed railways to enable faster and more flexible maneuvering. Similarly, blitzkrieg—an evolution of the same German military principles—would be used against the Allies in World War II to great and terrible effect.
“Lightning war” has taken on new meaning—and ubiquity—in the era of digital warfare. Speeds are instantaneous. Attackers need not sacrifice lethality to sustain mobility, as geography is no longer a constraint. Although that combination has largely favored the offense in digital attacks, an AI era could see the increase of the velocity of response and allow cyberdefenses to match cyberoffenses.
In kinetic warfare, AI will provoke another leap forward. Drones, for instance, will be extremely quick and unimaginably mobile. Once AI is deployed not only to guide one drone but to direct fleets of them, clouds of drones will form and fly in sync as a single cohesive collective, perfect in their synchronicity. Future drone swarms will dissolve and reconstitute themselves effortlessly in units of every size, much as elite special-operations forces are built from scalable detachments, each of which is capable of sovereign command.
In addition, AI will provide similarly speedy and flexible defenses. Drone fleets are impractical if not impossible to shoot down with conventional projectiles. But AI-enabled guns firing rounds of photons and electrons (instead of ammunition) could re-create the same lethal disabling capacities as a solar storm that can fry the circuitry of exposed satellites.
AI-enabled weapons will be unprecedentedly exact. Limits to the knowledge of an antagonist’s geography have long constrained the capabilities and intentions of any warring party. But the alliance between science and war has come to ensure increasing accuracy in instruments, and AI can be expected to make more breakthroughs. AI will thus shrink the gap between original intent and ultimate outcome, including in the application of lethal force. Whether land-based drone swarms, machine corps deployed in the sea, or possibly interstellar fleets, machines will possess highly precise capabilities of killing humans with little degree of uncertainty and with limitless impact. The bounds of the potential destruction will hinge only on the will, and the restraint, of both human and machine.
In kinetic warfare, AI will provoke a huge leap forward.
That being so, the AI age of warfare will be reduced primarily to an assessment not of an adversary’s capabilities but rather of its intentions and their strategic applications. In the nuclear age, we have already entered such a phase—but its dynamics and significance will come into much sharper focus as AI proves its worth as a weapon of war.
With such valuable technology involved, humans may not even be the primary targets of AI-enabled war. AI could in fact remove humans as a proxy in warfare entirely, making war less deadly but potentially no less decisive. Similarly, territory alone seems unlikely to provoke AI aggression—but data centers and other critical digital infrastructure certainly could.
Surrender, then, will come not when the opponent’s numbers are diminished and its armory empty but when the survivors’ shield of silicon is rendered incapable of saving its technological assets—and finally its human deputies. War could evolve into a game of purely mechanical fatalities, the deciding factor being the psychological strength of the human (or AI) who must contest to risk, or forfeit to prevent, a breakthrough moment of total destruction.
Even the motives governing the new battlefield would be alien, to some extent. The English writer G. K. Chesterton once quipped that “the true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.” An AI war is unlikely to involve love or hate, let alone a concept of soldierly bravery. On the other hand, it may still incorporate ego, identity, and loyalty—although the nature of those identities and loyalties may not be consistent with those of today.
The calculation in warfare has always been relatively straightforward: whichever side first finds intolerable the pain of battle will likely be conquered. The consciousness of one’s own shortcomings has in the past produced restraint. Without such awareness, and with no sense for (and thus a great tolerance of) pain, one cannot but wonder what, if anything, would prompt restraint in an AI that has been introduced into warfare, and what would conclude the conflicts it wages. A chess-playing AI, if it had never been informed of the rules dictating the end of the game, could play to the very last pawn.
GEOPOLITICAL RESTRUCTURING
In every age of humanity, almost as if in obedience to some natural law, there has emerged, as one of us (Kissinger) once put it, a unit “with the power, the will, and the intellectual and moral impetus to shape the entire international system in accordance with its own values.” The most familiar arrangement of human civilizations is that of the Westphalian system as conventionally understood. The idea of the sovereign nation-state, however, is only a few centuries old, having emerged from treaties that are collectively known as the Peace of Westphalia in the mid-seventeenth century. It is not the preordained unit of social organization, and it may not be suited for the age of AI. Indeed, as mass disinformation and automated discrimination trigger a loss of faith in that arrangement, AI may pose an inherent challenge to the power of national governments. Alternatively, AI may well reset the relative positions of competitors within today’s system. If its powers are harnessed primarily by nation-states themselves, humanity could be forced toward a hegemonic stasis, or else toward a new equilibrium of AI-empowered nation-states. But the technology could also be the catalyst of an even more fundamental transition—a shift to an entirely new system, in which state governments would in turn be forced to abandon their central role in the global political infrastructure.
One possibility is that the companies that own and develop AI will accrue totalizing social, economic, military, and political power. Today’s governments are forced to contend with their difficult position both as cheerleaders for private corporations—lending their military power, diplomatic capital, and economic heft to promote these homegrown firms—and as supporters of the average citizen suspicious of monopolistic greed and secrecy. That may prove an untenable contradiction.
Meanwhile, corporations could form alliances to consolidate their already considerable strength. Those alliances might be built on complementary advantages and the profit of amalgamation or, alternatively, on a shared philosophy of development and deployment of AI systems. These corporate alliances might take on traditional nation-state functions, though rather than seeking to define and expand bounded territories, they would cultivate diffuse digital networks as their domains.
AI may pose an inherent challenge to the power of national governments.
And there is still another alternative. Uncontrolled, open-source diffusion could give rise to smaller gangs or tribes with substandard but substantial AI capacities, sufficient to administer to, provide for, and defend themselves within some limited scope. Among human groups that reject established authority in favor of decentralized finance, communication, and governance, such technology-enabled proto-anarchy could win out. Or such groupings might incorporate a religious dimension. After all, in terms of reach, Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism have all been larger and longer-lasting than any state in history. In the age to come, religious denomination, more than national citizenship, might conceivably prove the more relevant framework for identity and loyalty.
In either future, whether dominated by corporate alliances or diffused into loose religious groupings, the new “territory” that each group would claim—and over which they would fight—would not be inches of land but a digital landscape, seeking the loyalties of individual users. Linkages between these users and any administration would subvert the traditional notion of citizenship, and agreements between the entities would be unlike ordinary alliances.
Historically, alliances have been forged by individual leaders and have served to augment a nation’s strength in case of war. By contrast, the prospect of citizenships and alliances—and perhaps conquests or crusades—structured around the opinions, beliefs, and subjective identities of ordinary people in times of peace would require a new (or very old) conception of empire. It would also force a reassessment of the obligations entailed in pledging allegiance and the cost of exit options, if indeed any were to exist in the AI-entangled future.
PEACE AND POWER
The foreign policies of nation-states have been built and then adjusted by balancing idealism and realism. The temporary balances struck by our leaders are seen in retrospect not as end-states but as only ephemeral (if necessary) strategies for their time. With each new age, this tension has produced a different expression of what constitutes political order. The dichotomy between the pursuit of interests and the pursuit of values—or between a particular nation-state’s advantage and the global good—has been part of this unending evolution. In the conduct of their diplomacy, leaders of smaller states historically have responded straightforwardly, prioritizing the necessities of their own survival. By contrast, those responsible for global empires, with the means to realize additional goals, have faced a more agonizing predicament.
Since the beginning of civilization, as human units of organization have grown, they have simultaneously achieved new levels of cooperation. But today, perhaps because of the scale of planetary challenges as well as to the material inequalities evident among and within states, a backlash against this trend has surfaced. AI could prove commensurate to the demands of this still-grander scale of human governance, capable of seeing with granularity and fidelity not merely the imperatives of the country but also the interplay of the globe.
We harbor a hope that AI, deployed for political ends at home and abroad, might do more than just illuminate balanced tradeoffs. Ideally, it could provide new, globally optimal solutions, acting on a longer time horizon and with greater precision than humans are capable of, and thus bringing competing human interests into alignment. In the coming world, machine intelligences navigating conflict and negotiating peace might help clarify, or even surmount, traditional dilemmas.
However, if AI were indeed to fix problems that we should have hoped to solve ourselves, we could face a crisis of confidence—of both overconfidence and the lack of confidence. To the former, once we understand the limits of our own ability for self-correction, it may be difficult to admit that we have come to cede too much power to machines in handling existential issues of human conduct. To the latter, the realization that simply removing human agency from the handling of our affairs has been enough to solve our most intractable problems might reveal too explicitly the shortcomings of human design. If peace has always been but a simple voluntary choice, the price of human imperfection has been paid in the coin of perpetual war. To know that a solution has always existed but has never been conceived by us would be crushing to human pride.
In the case of security, unlike that of the displacement of people in scientific or other academic endeavors, we may more readily accept the impartiality of a mechanical third party as necessarily superior to the self-interestedness of a human—just as humans easily recognize the need for a mediator in a contentious divorce. Some of our worst traits will enable us to exhibit some of our best: that the human instinct toward self-interest, even at the expense of others, may prepare us for accepting AI’s transcendence of the self.
