Connectivity is instrumental to ensuring geopolitical stability, economic and energy security, and a successful digital and green transformation. It is now a geostrategic imperative to do business with trusted partners according to our common interests, our democratic values, and our highest standards—the essence of trusted connectivity.

These themes underline this year’s Tallinn Digital Summit, an annual event hosted by the Estonian Prime Minister that gathers together leaders of like-minded and digitally-advanced countries, international organizations, and the private sector to address the most pressing issues on our road toward a connected digital future.

Tallinn Digital Summit 2021 focused on Trusted Connectivity as a shared conceptual framework for like-minded democracies to consolidate and amplify their several connectivity initiatives while also highlighting the nexus between cross-border infrastructure, geopolitics, and digital technologies.

This year’s Summit will focus on delivering trusted connectivity through trusted partnerships. The Summit will elaborate on what a trusted and secure digital society could look like, as well as on concrete steps for governments, financial institutions, international organizations, technical experts, and the private sector to take to ensure our digital future advances human freedom, human dignity, and the rules-based international order.

We will explore the role of trusted connectivity and trusted partnerships in ensuring global stability and the resilience of supply chains, in enhancing energy, economic, and cyber security, in cooperation on digital policy and international standards, in the development and deployment of artificial intelligence, clouds and satellites, digital public goods, and Web 3.0, as well as in the reconstruction of a free and democratic Ukraine. All this necessitates the holistic shaping of the requisite political, institutional, and entrepreneurial ecosystems to increase public and private investments in infrastructure and utilizing the concept of trusted connectivity to construct an architecture of trust within the rules-based international system.

The Summit takes place against the backdrop of several momentous developments. First, many have recently introduced new connectivity initiatives, including the G7, the EU’s Global Gateway, the UK’s Clean Green Initiative, and the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity. Second, Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, in conjunction with continuing cyberattacks against vital infrastructure, have amply underscored the geopolitical importance of values-based investments into trusted connectivity and of reducing our strategic dependencies on malign actors. We are faced with new geostrategic imperatives but also with an auspicious opportunity to enhance our cooperation in the face of shared challenges.