The world’s democracies should form a “digital alliance” that is bound not by geography, but by shared values to combat growing cyberthreats in a new digital era, former Estonian president Toomas Hendrik Ilves said in Taipei on Tuesday.
In the age of digitalization, virtually all industries and communications, as well as politics, are mediated by digital platforms, Ilves told the virtual Ketagalan Forum: 2022 Indo-Pacific Security Dialogue.
Heavy reliance on computer technology has led to new security threats, which have significantly changed the nature of modern warfare, said Ilves, who was president of Estonia from 2006 to 2016.
However, this does not mean that traditional kinetic warfare has disappeared, as exemplified by the “brutal” Russian invasion of Ukraine, he said.
The invasion of Ukraine can also be seen as the “first case in modern history of a great power with near-peer cybercapability waging a major conventional war,” he said.
Moscow’s cyberoperations shut down Ukraine’s electrical grid in 2015, he said, adding that Russian capabilities have since expanded.
After the invasion of Ukraine in late February, Russian forces disabled Ukrainian satellite communications and embarked on an online disinformation campaign, he said.
The growth of cyberthreats has led to a dramatic change in security issues, which is that “geography no longer matters,” Ilves said.
However, NATO, for example, represents only a regional bloc, excluding liberal democracies such as Taiwan, Australia, Japan, South Korea and New Zealand, he said.
“All of this leads me to argue that we need a digital alliance like NATO, but one that is really and truly value-based, that includes all liberal democracies that wish to be a part of it, and is not bound by geography, but by shared values,” he said.
After all, the threats faced by liberal democracies are no longer geographically bound, he added.
As technology changes, so should the nature of conflict and security, Ilves said.
“The West as a whole, meaning all of us here, continue to build, or at least plan to build, castles that are more in the air than grounded in reality, while our adversaries are busy producing ever better gunpowder,” he said.
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