Question

1. Define and summarize the role of Geopolitics in Cyber Risk Management.

2. Identify the geopolitics of key nations (include at a minimum: U.S., China, Russia, and Iran)

Answer 1

Geopolitics means the study of geographic and economic factors and their influences on politics and power relationships between nations.

Individual hackers and organized crime organizations have targeted businesses for years, but cyberattacks have rarely created political risk but they do now. Cyber warfare can be exerted by any nation with an actual or perceived grievance against any other nation. The primary cause is political mistrust between different geopolitical regions combined with the emergence of cyberspace as a de facto theater of war.Any cyber security strategy begins with trust.The fundamental cause of cyber warfare is international political mistrust. As this escalates, so international cyber incidents increase – and there is little doubt that political mistrust is as high as it has ever been .

2.US

As world leaders gather for the annual opening of the UN General Assembly, a geopolitics of respect is a hidden agenda. The self-confidence of strong geopolitical power is always on display .Demands for respect by the U.S. are the core aspect of what might be called the world geopolitics of emotion, which is no less real than military capabilities. Resentment of greater power and historical memories of defeat and outside interference often produce a desire for revenge. The opposite of being respected is a sense of humiliation, not the least important and sometimes irrational motives of international policy.Three countries among the biggest powers — China, Russia, Iran — arrive at the UN with the issue of respect a hidden agenda behind conflicts of interests and policies. If Beijing, Moscow and Tehran are America’s principal geopolitical rivals, their sense of the dignity of their own histories and cultures creates a natural resentment of American claims to a unique place in world politics and political culture.

2. RUSSIA
a Russia that counts, whose voice in international relations must be reckoned with in major international issues. Russia’s history implies a geopolitical calling in which the Soviet Union, because of weak leadership, is an unlamented failure. Russia’s post-Communist governments, Mikhail Gorbachev’s as well as Boris Yeltsin’s, were humiliated by the West. Russia has new possibilities of alliance if not friendships.

3. IRAN

Negotiating its nuclear program with the P5 + 1 big powers over the past few years put Iran at the center of the broad evolution of Middle Eastern geopolitics. Islamist jihad movements — Islamic State but also the remnants of Al Qaeda and smaller networks — may have had their day, especially as Russia and Iran commit to combat them with ground forces. What Tehran intends in the region is a matter of great importance.Iran’s increasing geopolitical influence is unquestionable. What Tehran wants from the world’s powers, especially the U.S., is some guarantee that regime change is not Western policy and some accommodation of increased Iranian influence, which, as is the case with Russia, is justified by Iran’s size and geopolitical importance.

4. CHINA

China’s President Xi Jinping has just arrived in the U.S. for a state visit and the ritual speech at the UN General Assembly. He landed first in Seattle (to emphasize the importance of high tech and business in the China-U.S. relationship), where he made an important speech detailing China’s self-definition and its subdued economic ambitions at home.China, in spite of its expanding claims in the China Sea, is the least urgent of Washington’s three major geopolitical worries. But in the long term it is America’s most substantial global partner and competitor. How far Beijing will attempt to become a global power and to what extent it will keep its promise not to try to overthrow the international order but revise it in favor in favor of developing countries, is uncertain. What is certain is that Beijing knows it will be impossible to supplant the U.S. as the world’s pre-eminent power and that in strategic terms it would be a waste of resources to try.