Cyber Offence Dominance, Regional Dynamics, and Middle Power–led International Cooperation

Despite the maturing of the cyber domain as an important area of contestation and conflict vector, there are no truly multilateral conventions governing cyber operations and cyberconflict in terms of national and military security. This is problematic because a lack of norms both (a) incentivizes predatory behaviour and (b) increases risks of misperception, misunderstanding, cybersecurity dilemmas, and conflict escalation. In this context, this chapter provides a cyber threat landscape and analyses strategic competition and conflict among selected states in East Asia (the US, China, South Korea, North Korea, Japan, Russia) via the cyber domain. Following that, this chapter applies offence-defence theory to the cyber domain in order to predict states’ likely cyberspace behaviour. To this end, the chapter argues that the cyber domain is offence dominant, leading to increased risks of escalatory chainganging. Flowing from this analysis, the chapter seeks to determine what kinds of international cooperation could reduce this escalatory cyber tendency, and how the EU is cooperating with like-minded states such as South Korea to reduce cyber threats.