The New Great Game: Capital as Strategic Instrument
01 October 2025 - A Weekly Publication by New North Ventures
When Geography Becomes Destiny Again
The 19th century Great Game—Britain and Russia’s decades-long competition for influence across Central Asia—unfolded through infrastructure investment, intelligence networks, and commercial penetration rather than pitched battles. Today’s great power competition operates through remarkably similar mechanisms, with semiconductor supply chains replacing railways and technology standards substituting for telegraph lines. For those deploying capital in dual-use markets, this parallel offers more than historical curiosity. It provides a lens for understanding how investment decisions increasingly carry strategic weight beyond traditional financial metrics.
The Architecture of Economic Statecraft
Contemporary statecraft increasingly relies on geoeconomic tools, requiring the deliberate cultivation and deployment of economic relationships to achieve strategic objectives. China’s 2010 rare earth export restrictions against Japan demonstrated how resource dependencies create coercive leverage. Tokyo’s automotive and electronics industries faced immediate supply uncertainty and price volatility, creating economic uncertainty that translated to national insecurity, despite the lack of any military action. America’s semiconductor export controls targeting specific Chinese firms and European debates over energy infrastructure dependence reveal markets themselves as contested terrain where state and private actors pursue overlapping objectives.
The CHIPS Act’s $52 billion and Europe’s €43 billion semiconductor initiative themselves signal a decisive shift. Advanced technology development increasingly occurs within state-influenced ecosystems rather than purely market-driven environments. Government procurement patterns, export control regimes, and allied co-investment structures now shape technology trajectories alongside traditional market forces.
Strategic Implications for Capital Allocation
Three dynamics warrant examination. First, defense procurement cycles now directly influence commercial product development in ways that compress traditional dual-use timelines. Second, investment sourcing and screening mechanisms across allied nations create structural preferences for domestic or allied capital sources. Third, technology standards battles increasingly determine market access before products reach commercialization.
These patterns suggest that private capital operates in environments where strategic considerations shape investment logic in ways that merit closer examination. How these dynamics affect competitive advantage, exit pathways, and value creation remains an open question worth exploring as the relationship between state objectives and market mechanisms continues to evolve. New North Ventures will be tracking and continuing to examine this evolution.
Navigating the New Nuclear Map
The recent Texas National Security Review (TNSR) roundtable examines how nuclear strategy must adapt to a world with multiple peer nuclear powers for the first time since the early Cold War. The central challenge: U.S. strategic planning developed around bilateral deterrence with the Soviet Union, but now faces simultaneous nuclear relationships with Russia and China, plus threshold states like North Korea and Iran.
Several contributors emphasize that Cold War frameworks no longer suffice. Brendan Green argues that U.S. extended deterrence commitments to allies in both Europe and Asia create new vulnerabilities when facing two peer competitors who might coordinate challenges. Keir Lieber and Daryl Press note that China’s nuclear expansion—projected to reach 1,500 warheads by 2035—fundamentally alters strategic calculations about damage limitation and first-strike stability.
The supply chain dimension matters for dual-use investors. Matthew Kroenig highlights that nuclear modernization requires industrial capacity across warhead production, delivery systems, and command infrastructure. The U.S. currently lacks sufficient plutonium pit production capacity, submarine construction throughput, and specialized components manufacturing to execute planned modernization while maintaining existing arsenals.
Francis Gavin warns against overlearning Cold War lessons. The bipolar nuclear competition featured relatively stable adversaries with shared interests in avoiding apocalypse. Today’s environment includes actors with different risk tolerances, less communication infrastructure, and potential for multi-party miscalculation during regional conflicts.
The roundtable suggests that nuclear strategy increasingly depends on industrial capacity and technology supply chains rather than just warhead counts—a shift that blurs traditional lines between defense industrial base investments and strategic deterrence capability.
More links to explore:
Cybera has been accepted to present research at APWG eCrime 2025, a peer-reviewed conference that brings together researchers, financial institutions, law enforcement, and security practitioners to address global cybercrime. The company’s paper, “Send to Which Account? Evaluation of an LLM-Based Scambaiting System,” demonstrates how AI-powered conversational honeypots can extract actionable threat intelligence directly from scammers that.
Over five months, Cybera’s system initiated over 2,600 conversations with real scammers, generating more than 18,700 messages. The system achieved a 32% Information Disclosure Rate, successfully capturing sensitive financial details including mule bank accounts and cryptocurrency wallets. This intelligence enables banks, payment processors, and law enforcement to freeze funds before victims lose money.
The research addresses a fundamental challenge in fraud prevention: moving from reactive victim protection to proactive disruption of criminal infrastructure. By engaging scammers at scale through large language models, Cybera demonstrates how AI can gather intelligence that stops fraud before it succeeds, representing a shift in how financial institutions approach scam prevention.
In this episode of Securing Our Future, host Jeremy Hitchock, explores the intersection of national security and economic opportunity with Bryan Mabry, the newest Partner at New North Ventures. Bryan draws on his 14 years at the CIA, leadership roles in Fortune 200 companies, and experience as acting CFO of the Millennium Challenge Corporation to share lessons from public service and his transition to the private sector. They discuss the dual-use potential of emerging technologies such as AI, autonomous systems, and remote actuated weapon systems, and how they are reshaping both innovation and security. Bryan also reflects on the role of venture capital in accelerating solutions at this critical crossroads. Don’t miss this engaging conversation on the future of innovation, resilience, and national security.
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