Governing the invisible: Connectivity, dependency, and strategic autonomy

March 3, 2026

Victoria Hernandez-Valcarcel, GTWN President, Europe

The strategic technologies that dominate today’s power struggles – artificial intelligence, semiconductors, batteries, quantum systems – are often discussed as separate arenas of competition. Different supply chains, different national strategies, different races to win. Yet they all rely on the same invisible thread. When that thread is strained, contested, or cut, technological supremacy reveals its fragility. 

That thread is connectivity.

Connectivity is where geopolitics becomes operational. Sanctions, export controls, cyber operations, spectrum battles, subsea cables, satellite constellations – these are no longer peripheral concerns but pressure points where political decisions translate into technological consequences. Intelligence without circulation is inert. Energy without coordination becomes unstable. Industrial capacity without networks cannot scale or endure.

For this reason, sovereignty and leadership in the current decade cannot be reduced to owning frontier technologies. They depend on the ability to secure, govern, and defend resilient, ethical, and interoperable infrastructures under conditions of tension and uncertainty. Nowadays, connectivity is not a neutral utility. It is the carrier wave through which power is exercised, dependencies are revealed, and strategic autonomy is either reinforced or quietly eroded.

Over the past decade, connectivity has moved from the background of geopolitics to its front line. Sanctions now target chips, software updates, cloud access, and satellite services. Conflicts are fought not only on land and sea, but through jamming, cyber operations, and the contestation of spectrum and space-based infrastructure. Subsea cables, once treated as neutral plumbing, have become objects of strategic concern. Fragmentation of standards, supply chains, and digital spheres is no longer hypothetical; it is already shaping investment decisions and technology roadmaps.

The global technology landscape is entering a phase of strategic bifurcation. Export controls restrict access to advanced semiconductors. Data localisation laws redraw digital borders. Alliances harden around trusted vendors, while others are excluded from critical networks. Even technologies long considered purely civilian — cloud platforms, AI models, connectivity equipment — are now assessed through a security lens. What was optimised for efficiency is scrutinised for dependence; what was designed for scale is tested for resilience.

In this environment, connectivity is where abstraction ends. When access to updates, routing capacity, satellite coverage, or secure components is lost, innovation does not merely slow – it reverses. Systems degrade. Trust erodes. Strategic options narrow. Mastery of frontier technologies without control over the infrastructures that connect them is no longer leadership; it is vulnerability disguised as progress.

The war in Ukraine illustrates how connectivity has become a strategic battlefield. From the earliest days of the conflict, mobile networks, satellite connectivity, cyber operations, and spectrum control proved as decisive as conventional hardware. When terrestrial networks were damaged, satellite-based connectivity sustained communications for civilian authorities, emergency services, and military coordination. At the same time, jamming and cyberattacks exposed how fragile modern systems become when connectivity is contested.

What this episode revealed was not only the importance of access to networks, but the strategic significance of who controls them, who can deny them, and under what conditions they can be withdrawn or restored. Connectivity ceased to be a neutral service; it became a lever of power and a point of vulnerability. The lesson extends beyond warfare: any society whose strategic technologies depend on infrastructures it cannot secure, repair, or govern under pressure is exposed long before the first shot is fired.

Strategic exposure, however, does not require war. I experienced this fragility in a far less dramatic but revealing context: the 2025 blackout in Spain. Within minutes, what failed was not only electricity. Mobile coverage became unstable. Digital payments stalled. Transport slowed. Retail stopped. Coordination between services degraded. Information became partial and asynchronous. What had been designed as seamless, real-time infrastructure reverted to manual workarounds and improvisation.

The episode was brief, but instructive. It showed how tightly modern economies depend on the continuous coupling of energy and connectivity — and how thin the margin is between normal operation and systemic stress.

No adversary was involved, yet the effects mirrored, at a civilian scale, the vulnerabilities exposed in conflict zones. Strategic exposure requires only interruption.

Not every innovation carries systemic risk. A technology becomes strategic precisely when its failure, loss of access, or loss of control produces cascading consequences across sectors, institutions, and borders. Strategy begins where disruption is no longer local.

These conditions all describe the same underlying shift: when a technology becomes embedded in the continuity of society itself.

First, when it becomes a bottleneck: constrained access stalls entire value chains.

Second, when it is inherently dual-use, erasing the line between civilian efficiency and security dependency.

Third, when it shapes standards and ecosystems, locking in advantages that outlast product cycles.

Fourth, when it concentrates power, amplifying asymmetries that demand governance to prevent coercion.

Finally, when it determines climate and resource trajectories, shaping long-term economic viability.

What unites these conditions is not technical sophistication, but systemic consequence. Strategic technologies are not defined by novelty; they are defined by what happens when they fail, fracture, or fall under external control. This is why most strategic technologies are not products but systems – binding together economics, security, and legitimacy over decades.

In the current era, strategy therefore begins with a shift in perspective: from celebrating innovation to mapping dependency; from chasing speed to designing resilience. Leadership is no longer about moving faster than competitors. It is about remaining able to act when conditions deteriorate.

For decades, connectivity was treated as background infrastructure: essential, but neutral. That assumption no longer holds. Connectivity has become a governance object — a system whose design choices embed power, distribute risk, and determine who retains agency under stress. Decisions about network architecture, data flows, software updates, standards, and energy coupling are no longer operational details. They are strategic commitments, often irreversible.

This shift is slowly surfacing in how states and institutions reorganise capital and priorities. The European Union’s Strategic Technologies for Europe Platform (STEP) reflects a recognition that strategic technologies cannot be addressed in isolation, but must be scaled as interdependent systems under resilient governance. Similarly, the ScaleUp Europe Fund (SEF) underscores that strategic success depends not only on innovation, but on financing the transition to industrial leadership without ceding critical control.

What these instruments cannot resolve on their own is the strategic condition of existing assets. The technological landscape is not built on a greenfield. It rests on infrastructures deployed under assumptions of stability that no longer hold. Sovereignty can be lost not through failure to innovate, but through inability to adapt legacy systems to sustained geopolitical stress.

This creates a dual challenge: scaling future capabilities while securing and hardening the infrastructures societies already depend on. Ignoring either side produces fragility – innovation without continuity, or assets without resilience.

Critical infrastructures concentrate this risk. Connectivity, energy, cloud, finance, transport, and industrial control systems are tightly coupled. Their failures cascade across sectors faster than institutions are prepared to respond. Resilience cannot be engineered in silos. It requires interoperability by design – technical, organisational, and governance-level – and shared stress testing under compound disruption.

Sovereignty, in this context, is not isolation and not dominance. It is the capacity to govern interdependence – to preserve agency, coordination, and legitimacy under pressure. In an era defined by tension rather than equilibrium, leadership is measured less by speed than by endurance.

Victoria is an influential leader with a career spanning corporate leadership, governance and venture investment. She currently serves on the boards of listed and private companies, strengthening governance and strategy across telecoms, banking, mobility and industrial technologies. 

She is Member of the Board of the European Innovation Council, contributing to the strategic orientation of the European Union’s flagship instrument for breakthrough and deep-tech innovation, and on the design and governance of innovation programmes at continental scale.

A recognized voice on the ethical dimensions of technology, she is actively engaged in Digital Humanism, and has published essays on how AI, governance and human agency can be aligned in the age of disruptive innovation.

Victoria is Europe President of Global Telecom Women’s Network (GTWN).