In the years leading up to and following the end of the Cold War, Russia and China were disoriented and perplexed by the apparent failure of their central- ly-planned economies and the seeming rejection of communism by their own populations. [...] According to this line of thought, by including them in the World Trade Organization (WTO) and – in the case of Russia – giving them access to the World Bank and mem- bership in the G7, Russia and China would plainly see the benefits of being “responsible stakeholders” (Zoellick 2005). [...] While information operations against the Five have existed since the Cold War, the onset of the “Information Age” has rad- ically changed the operational environment, shifting the scope, the level of penetration, and the targeting capabilities of information operations.39 With the combining of 5G telecommunications, smart sensors, wearable devices, and big data analytics, states are developing eve. [...] The third feature is the effort by the Western liberal democracies to adjust to the first two trends – and to the geopolitical strategies that China and Russia have adopted. [...] Kun-Chin Lin, a noted Cam- bridge scholar, states that “in the past two decades, the crucial change in glob- al shipping has been the back and forth swing in the balance of traffic via the eastbound route through the Pacific and Panama Canal and the westbound route via the Indian Ocean and Suez Canal” (Lin 2019, 15).
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- 88
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- Canada
