The strategic chessboard after the war in Ukraine

We have entered the third year of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in the same operational status with which the second year began, when the authors coordinated by Guillem Colom and Josep Baqués were preparing their texts for 'The strategic environment after the war in Ukraine'. No subsequent novelty, therefore, has altered their analyses, apart from the fact that, having already set the high beams, their essays look beyond the conflict itself, as indicated by the degree scroll of the work itself. The war has modified the strategic environment in which we live, as part of a dynamic that confronts the United States and Europe, on the one hand, and China and Russia, on the other, with their respective partners. The thirteen authors of the book deal with this new framework . "We will not talk about (...) a war that has already begun", it is said in the first pages, "but about the need to interpret the landslides that this war is provoking".

Unlike what sometimes happens in collective contributions, here the texts do not overlap each other to address sometimes almost the same thing, although perhaps with somewhat different perspectives, but there is a clear and efficient distribution of work. Thus, the reading is interesting, as if they were the chapters of a single research, with the advantage that each author contributes his or her specialization program as an expert in the section he or she writes.

Thus, Josep Baqués signature a more theoretical first chapter, where he questions the existence of an 'international community' and points out that the world is moving towards a new dynamic of blocs. Juan Tovar deals with the US ideological discussion on how to deal with skill with China and stresses that Biden's 2022 National Security Strategy no longer considers it necessary to convert autocracies into democracies, but to ensure that they accept an international system based on rules, as opposed to 'revisionist autocracies'. Javier Morales focuses on Russia's strategy and Rubén Ruiz-Ramas on that of China. Chapters follow on the skill between powers in the scenarios of Southeast Asia (Javier Gil) and the Greater Maghreb (Natividad Fernández); the EU and NATO (Beatriz Cózar) and their relations (Francisco Ruiz); the defense policies of Germany and the Nordic countries (Alberto Bueno), France and Poland (Laura García) ...

The most direct allusion to development of the war in Ukraine runs to position by Manuel Torres, who focuses on one aspect: cybernetics. It was assumed that, given the advances in this field, the next big war to take place would have a high cyberwar component. The big surprise is that this has not been the case; moreover, "as has been the case with the conventional military domain, the cyber capabilities of the Russian Federation have been profoundly overestimated." The author concludes that it may have been an exaggeration to consider cyberspace as a 'fifth domain' of warfare.

Guillem Colom's contribution on the impact that the war in Ukraine has had on Spanish defense stands out. "It is still too early", he considers, "to conclude that our country has definitively awakened from its strategic lethargy". He regrets that the strategic culture, which conditions the configuration of national defense policies, has been so absent in Spain. "Our political, cultural, social and economic elites lack it," he notes.

Thus, "Spain lacks a strategy that responds to its geopolitical reality, that of a peninsula located at the western end of the European continent, with two archipelagos -one Mediterranean and the other Atlantic- and sovereignty positions in North Africa, with access to one of the main bottlenecks of the globe and a non-shared threat (in reference letter to the Moroccan ambition over Ceuta and Melilla) with our allies".

The increase of expense in defense may be a sign that status is maturing somewhat. Colom does not want to throw the bells to the flight, but it is an evidence that in Spain there is beginning to be strategic thinking: the book itself brings together a group of university professors and researchers whose work is sample of that maturation. It is another matter whether this reaches the policies of a country and its budget, but this cannot happen without the former. Individuals have been there before, now we have a cohort and let us hope that the pyramid will widen.