Technology as the silent factor in international relations

The Quiet Hand on the Scales

In 1898, as European armies carved up Africa, Hilaire Belloc wrote a couplet that explained the age better than any treaty: "Whatever happens, we have got / The Maxim gun, and they have not." No conference at Berlin had decided that a few thousand soldiers could rule millions; a machine had. Diplomats sign agreements, generals fight wars and leaders give speeches, so they occupy the foreground of international relations. Technology rarely appears in the photographs of summits, yet it decides who is invited, how loudly each guest speaks and what each can afford to refuse. Technology is the silent factor in international relations because it quietly redistributes power beneath the visible drama of diplomacy and war; in our century that silence has turned into open contest, and a nation's place in the world now depends on what it can make, own and govern.

The silence has a reason. Textbook accounts of world politics speak of alliances, ideologies and balances of power, but a balance of power is ultimately a balance of capabilities, and capabilities are made of technology. Kautilya listed the fort, the treasury and the army among the seven elements of the state in the Arthashastra, each one a product of the engineering of its time. Technology works slowly, through diffusion rather than declaration, and much of it is dual-use: the rocket that carries a weather satellite can carry a warhead, and the chip in a phone can guide a missile. Because no one votes on it and no treaty announces it, its effects are noticed only after the scales have already tipped.

History bears this out. Babur's field artillery and matchlocks helped him defeat a far larger army of Ibrahim Lodi at Panipat in 1526 and opened a new chapter of Indian history. In The Tools of Empire, the historian Daniel Headrick showed that steamships, quinine and breech-loading rifles, not merely ambition, made the European conquest of Asia and Africa possible in the nineteenth century. The submarine telegraph cable that linked Britain and India in 1870 let London send orders to Bombay within hours rather than weeks. Each innovation was a quiet act of statecraft. The empires that owned the Industrial Revolution owned the map, and the colonies that missed it paid with their sovereignty.

The atom made the silent factor briefly deafening. Hiroshima in August 1945 ended a war and began an order. Nuclear deterrence kept the Cold War cold for four decades, and the Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1968 froze a technological hierarchy into law by recognising as nuclear powers only those that had tested before 1967. India refused to sign a treaty it considered discriminatory, tested in 1974 and again in 1998, and faced sanctions for doing so. A decade later, the India-US civil nuclear agreement and the waiver granted by the Nuclear Suppliers Group in September 2008 turned that same capability into diplomatic acceptance. Technology had changed India's status before any treaty did.

Space tells a similar story. The Soviet launch of Sputnik in 1957 shocked the United States into creating NASA in 1958 and transformed a scientific feat into a geopolitical race. India's own path shows how space capability becomes foreign policy. The South Asia Satellite launched in 2017 offered neighbours a shared asset, Mission Shakti in 2019 demonstrated an anti-satellite capability that strengthened India's voice in debates on space security, and Chandrayaan-3 in August 2023 made India the first country to land near the lunar south pole. India's signature on the Artemis Accords in June 2023 showed that rules for the Moon are now being written, and that only those with capability help write them.

Moreover, the economy of the twenty-first century runs on technologies that few countries control. The most advanced semiconductors are made by a handful of firms, concentrated in Taiwan, which is one reason the island sits at the centre of great-power anxiety. The United States passed the CHIPS and Science Act in 2022 and restricted exports of advanced chips to China from October that year, while China dominates the refining of rare earths and other critical minerals. Supply chains have become instruments of coercion. India's response, from the Semiconductor Mission launched in 2021 and Micron's assembly plant at Sanand to the US-India initiative on critical and emerging technologies in January 2023 and membership of the Minerals Security Partnership, treats technology as the new currency of partnership.

The digital domain has made the silent factor invisible in a new way. The Stuxnet worm, uncovered in 2010, damaged centrifuges at Iran's Natanz facility without a single shot fired, proving that code could do what bombers once did. Debates over Huawei in 5G networks, spyware such as Pegasus, and the undersea cables that carry almost all intercontinental data have turned networks into frontiers. After the Galwan clash, India banned TikTok and 58 other Chinese apps in June 2020, a reminder that data sovereignty is now part of national security. Yet the same domain is a source of soft power: India's Unified Payments Interface now links with Singapore's PayNow and is accepted in several other countries, and the G20 under India's presidency in 2023 endorsed digital public infrastructure as a tool of development.

Yet it would be wrong to treat technology as destiny. The superior firepower of the United States did not win in Vietnam, and two decades of technological dominance ended with the Taliban back in Kabul in August 2021. In Ukraine, cheap drones have challenged expensive armour. Will, legitimacy, alliances and diplomacy still decide outcomes, and technology diffuses: the mobile phone reached the poorest villages faster than any road. Technology also creates shared dangers that no state can manage alone, from autonomous weapons to artificial intelligence, which is why twenty-eight countries, India among them, signed the Bletchley Declaration on AI safety in November 2023. The silent factor amplifies power; it does not replace judgement.

What, then, should a rising power do? It must first build its own capability, because a nation that only buys technology will always rent its foreign policy. Atmanirbhar ambitions in defence, chips and clean energy serve this end. It must also practise techno-diplomacy, which the Ministry of External Affairs recognised by creating a division for new, emerging and strategic technologies in 2020. Through the International Solar Alliance, launched with France in 2015, and through Vaccine Maitri in 2021, India has shown that technology shared generously can win trust that coercion never buys. Finally, it must help write the global rules for cyberspace, AI and outer space, so that the next hierarchy is not frozen against it as the nuclear one was in 1968.

It is science alone that can solve the problems of hunger and poverty, of insanitation and illiteracy

Jawaharlal Nehru's conviction led a poor, newly independent India to build atomic, space and scientific institutions when many thought it could not afford them, and those institutions later gave the country its voice in nuclear and space diplomacy. Belloc's couplet about the Maxim gun described a world in which technology decided who ruled whom. The task now is to ensure that it decides who can solve the problems that no nation can solve alone. The silent factor will keep shaping international relations; the choice before nations is whether it speaks for domination or for development.