Anarchy: What’s Behind the Key Driver of Political Risk in Outer Space?

When analysing the post-pandemic international order, professor Stephen M. Walt affirmed that the biggest security challenge over the next decades will be the management of the growing rivalry between the US and China, which has so far prevented cooperation on areas such as climate change between these two very large, powerful countries. Certainly, great power competition has not been confined to the limits of our planet. As the recent Russian crash shows, in new moon race the chief US rival is China, being the second major power in space with 590 operating satellites.

Last year, both Marsh’s Political Risk Report and the World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report warned the growth of the space economy combined with the increased militarization of the final frontier could drive an escalation of geopolitical tensions, which could be exacerbated if there is a failure to collaborate on a robust governance framework, as a greater number and diversity of actors reach into space where the trend is to replace traditionally large and expensive single geostationary satellite systems with a more distributed system of multiple smaller satellites in Low Earth Orbit (LEO).

There are currently five international treaties underpinning space law: The Outer Space Treaty (1967), the Rescue Agreement (1968), the Liability Convention (1972), the Launch Registration Convention (1975) and the Moon Agreement (1979). Yet, as the 21st century has borne witness to an explosion of human activity of all kinds in space; the rules that govern that activity have failed to keep pace. What if an object launched into space by one nation may now come under the control of another nation—or even a private actor—through cyberwarfare? Is there any international law against blowing up a satellite and putting a space station at risk? Amid a dangerous deficit of governance where questions like these remain unanswered, the imperative for collective action has never been greater.

 ‘Wars occur because there is nothing to prevent them’. Kenneth Waltz’s Man, the State and War (1959) aimed to stress the qualities of the anarchic state system as the major source of the causes of war. According to this American political scientist, in international politics there is no higher authority than that of the state, thus states interact in an anarchic realm. Therefore, international anarchy is the definitional quality of the state system. In his point of view, this is where the major cause of war can be found.

Per aspera ad astra

In 2011, American representative Frank Wolf introduced what is now commonly referred to as the Wolf Amendment. Far from deterring its strategic competitor in space by limiting US government agencies from working with Chinese commercial or government agencies, China developed parallel capabilities. Without a way to contribute to the International Space Station, China embarked upon its own space station. Until 2019—when China landed a vehicle on the far side of the moon, something no other country had done before—the US did not see itself in a space race, rather assuming China’s space program was a reengineered Russian version. After that, China even landed a rover on Mars.

Back in 2013, international relations professor Shen Dingli envisaged: ‘Because China does not pursue global dominance through nuclear supremacy, it has maintained a minimum nuclear deterrent for national security and independence. In the same vein, China does not seek space hegemony through militarizing outer space, though it could not live with space dominance by America or any other state (…) When China finds the ground-based asymmetrical balance of power is upset by the US extending its military power into space, it develops the fear that the earthly balance could get out of sync. Beijing could thus feel under pressure to restore the balance’.

A decade has gone by and, as a Reuters review of almost 100 articles in more than 20 defence journals shows, there is an effort across China’s military-industrial complex to scrutinise the impact of US weapons and technology that could be deployed against Chinese forces in a war over Taiwan. Washington would defend Taiwan, relying heavily on precision-guided weapons to attack Chinese military targets. The Achilles’ heel of America’s more technologically advanced military is the dependence on space-based satellites. Moreover, as the SpaceX’s Starlink mega-constellation became vital both in Ukraine—revealing its military potential after allowing the targeting of Russian artillery and other assets—and Iran—letting dissidents to get their messages out—China has warned that commercial space providers that participate in a conflict are no longer neutral non-combatants. It is noteworthy that, as global security competition heats up in the Arctic where there is a greater need to overcome spotty, unreliable, and often non-existent communications, the Pentagon is testing SpaceX’s Starlink in order to help the US troops hook up to a satellite internet connection. For now, Chinese military researchers who are studying Russia’s struggles in Ukraine in planning for possible conflict with US-led forces in Asia concluded China needs the capability to track, monitor and shoot down LEO Starlink satellites.

Dead end in space governance?

Why is it so hard to reach consensus on basic norms of peaceful coexistence and negotiate new rules of state conduct on shared problems among spacefaring nations? Amid anarchy, China  needs to engage in balancing after what happened in Ukraine, with Taiwan in mind. In the meantime, the US is racing against the clock trying to safeguard its dominance by avoiding parity in space as it heavily relies on such strategic domain. Certainly, improving space governance seems difficult to address in this context of intense strategic competition. But, is it impossible?

Namrata Goswami considers the future of space depends on which great power can offer the most compelling inclusive vision backed by financial investments in the space infrastructure of partner nations. Great power competition and cooperation have resulted in broadcasting both civilian and military capacities. These have included signing civilian space cooperation agreements to explore the Moon and Mars along divergent strategic alignments resulting in competition between blocs (US-led versus China-led). Cooperation between adversarial blocs in space remains impossible due to the Wolf Amendment as well as concerns of civil-military fusion of space activities in China.

The co-author of the book Scramble for the Skies: The Great Power Competition To Control the Resources of Outer Space also noted strategic alignments are occurring along predictable lines; for instance, partners of the US-led Artemis Accords include US allies. This is the case of India—the first nation to land on the Lunar South Pole—who recently signed the Artemis Accords and also agreed to increase cooperation on planetary defense ‘to protect planet Earth and space assets from the impact of asteroids and near-Earth objects’. Middle powers are responding to great power alignments with a willingness to collaborate with both sides, based on their own strategic interests. For example, Luxembourg, which is positioning itself as a leader in the nascent space mining industry, is part of both the Artemis Accords and China’s Belt and Road. Also, after NASA and the South African National Space Agency (SANSA) renewed their partnership in lunar exploration in November 2022—with the groundbreaking of a new communications site that will support Artemis, including missions to return humans to the Moon and enable exploration beyond—, South Africa signed an agreement with China to participate in its International Lunar Research Station.

Back to traditional realist assumptions, as Hans Morgenthau once put forward, in the anarchic state system the absence of central ruling power leads to perpetual competition among states. Therefore, becoming a hegemon is the most viable option for any state, so as it can create an international order in which it can reap the most benefits due to its influential position. Moral realism, a Chinese international relations theory developed by Tsinghua University researcher Yan Xuetong, adds that in order to sustainably maintain its position in the international system, the hegemon needs to promote his strategic credibility by adhering to certain moral and international norms. Through this, it builds trust, credibility and, thus, authority. Moral realism seeks to answer why a rising state can, at times, replace a dominant state when it is still in a weaker position. It does so by promoting strategic credibility through acting morally. International moral norms, according to Yan, include equality, fairness, democracy, justice, freedom, and civility.

In line with this theory, China’s space capabilities provide the country some limited soft power. For example, China’s space station could allow it to provide costly public goods to the international community, making possible for other countries to carry out experiments in LEO, without fronting the costs of building and sustaining a space station. It also allows China to present itself as a more inclusive alternative to the US by letting both democracies and autocracies alike to participate in its space initiatives. Beyond China’s space station, China’s space technologies provide it other diplomatic tools, such as launch, satellite, and imaging services. More broadly, China’s space accomplishments allow it to present itself as a model and technological leader to developing countries.

‘The world used to be anchored by U.S. hegemony (…) But after a unipolar age comes a multipolar age, which requires a multipolar anchor’. Gordon Brown explains this anchor—and the stability it provides—must be built on reformed multilateral institutions. Indeed, such an overhaul of the global architecture is the only way to repair a global liberal order that is now neither global nor liberal nor orderly—and to overcome a geopolitical recession that has given us a global no man’s land of ungoverned spaces.

Even though developing a global space government framework in just one year is an ambitious task, the Summit of the Future in September 2024 could be a window of opportunity as the agenda of that meeting will include space. In this regard, a few months ago the UN released Our Common Agenda Policy Brief 7: For All Humanity – the Future of Outer Space Governance highlighting key topics for sustainability of outer space such as space traffic management, debris removal and resource activities. As global problems require global efforts, multilateralism may be the answer to overcome anarchy in outer space.