Watching Steve Witkoff praise one of the world’s great “humanitarians” – Vladimir Putin (the man directing a war of aggression against Ukraine and deliberately killing civilians every day of it) – and seeing Elon Musk and Donald Trump both being puzzled about who turned Starlink and Starshield down to “SLOW” in Ukraine gives an insight into a big shift in how the world works.
It’s a shift that devalues the deep institutional partnerships between Australian and US institutional counterparts.
This is a transformation that policy makers and intelligence agencies seeking to advise their government leaders have to take seriously. Technical and digital power is concentrated in a small number of companies – and a small number of individuals who run those companies. And political power is hyper personalised in individuals like Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, with Donald trump demonstrating the disconnection between a key leader and the government institutions that have previously advised US presidents and shaped US policy and directions.
Concentration of technological power in individuals is particularly striking in the United States and China. A handful of people make decisions that affect the global economy, information environment, communications infrastructure and military operations.
The problem goes well beyond Silicon Valley. It is a transformation of where power resides.
Elon Musk’s decisions about Starlink and its availability to Ukraine are an obvious illustration. Early in the war, he refused to give the Ukrainian government and military access to Starlink over Crimea because he personally feared Russian escalation to a broader war.
Later in the war, Musk has again decided who does and who doesn’t get access to Starlink, this time by denying Russia access to Starlink to use against Ukraine. The fact this second decision is a morally correct one is welcome, but not really the point. A private businessman has been making decisions affecting the conduct of a war and the capabilities available to two nations at war. Crucial decisions may not be based on the advice or decisions of the US government – the national government with jurisdiction over Musk.
Decisions of an individual can be capricious, instinctive, considered, insightful, impulsive or naïve, depending on the moment, the issue and the individual. That means governments are no longer the central actors in every strategically important decision.
Policy makers, advisers and intelligence agencies need to adjust accordingly.
Agencies need to understand not just governments, ministers, officials, departments and military headquarters, but the individuals who control critical companies, technologies and infrastructure.
As an example, here are some questions with important implications for several governments, including Australia’s.
Where and who is Nvidia’s Jensen Huang considering contracting for new semiconductor manufacturing? How is he planning his efforts to sell more advanced AI chips to Chinese firms and what is his strategy for engaging with the US Administration to allow this to happen?
Where is Jeff Bezos considering locating Amazon’s expanding logistics networks and data centres? Who and what is influencing his thinking?
What directions is Alibaba Chief Technology Officer Zhou Jingren taking Qwen models in both as technologies and as commercial propositions?
Where is the world’s computing power moving? Are any nations in our region (Indonesia?) likely to become powerful centres of computing power and what might that mean for other measures of power in the future? Is it all about data centres or is distributed computing power also a solution?
Which hyperscale AI companies are prepared to partner with Australia and on what terms? Who is making those decisions, on what factors and with what influences?
These are policy questions and they are intelligence questions. They are also increasingly national security questions with deep economic and societal implications.
In a world of personalised power, institutional relationships are no longer enough
Turning to the land of politics and broader government institutional relationships, Australia has traditionally benefited enormously from bureaucratic and intelligence cooperation with the United States and built deep institutional linkages with counterpart US institutions.
The institutional connections between Australian and American intelligence agencies remain valuable.
But the US political system is becoming more personalised, while the connections between some US institutions and American political decisionmakers are obviously less predictable. Political change in other places – like Germany and France and perhaps the UK show this isn’t an isolated problem, but the US has become the world leader in hyper-personalised, erratic decision making.
Understanding the United States, therefore, increasingly requires understanding the people around its political leadership as well as the formal institutions of government.
It turns out that it’s not just in Russia that folk like a leader’s ex-chef (the now deceased mercenary leader, Yevgeniy Prighozin) or business pals are key figures shaping their decisions.
In the current US Administration, perhaps some of the most influential voices and brains affecting what President Trump does, aside from his own instincts and judgements, have turned out to be his son-in-law Jared Kushner and one of President Trump’s golfing buddies, Steve Witkoff.
Cabinet figures like Marco Rubio and heavyweight institutions like the National Security Council, the State Department and the Office of National Intelligence look less influential and less connected to decision making than their predecessors under every previous Administration of the last 30 years.
This is not an argument for or against broad institutional or intelligence cooperation with America. It is an argument for recognising that cooperation and independent assessment are not opposites – we need both. It’s also an argument for recognising where influence is coming from in a system we engage with and depend upon deeply.
The old assumption that close friends do not collect intelligence on each other becomes much harder to sustain in a world where the sources and directions of decision-making are less predictable. Australia needs to know what America is doing, what America might do next, and what the drivers of decisions are.
Australian agencies need to be able to maintain intelligence and assessments that are genuinely Australian, and simply not shared with our American ally. That means Australian Eyes Only (the “AUSTEO” label) needs to become a more meaningful and larger category.
The world Australian institutions and government – and its intelligence agencies – operate in has changed. We need to recognise the changes and act on them, because the old world we built around has gone.
This is an extract from “Hyper-digitised and hyper-personalised: the world has hard problems for Australia’s intelligence community” available here.