Despite humans having witnessed a dramatic evolution in global governance and connectivity, the underlying constraints shaping their group consciousness in conflict are largely primitive.
These constraints are functions of human instincts, frozen in their history, geography, and meta-narratives, thus making geopolitics a predictable affair. Few takeaways are important to sketch out the geopolitical landscape in the second quarter of this century, which is about to start in a few months.
China’s swift shift from land to naval power, with a mighty industrial workshop, is the most consequential takeaway, which has split the future global order into economic and security orders. The US-China power struggle will be more methodical and dynamic than it was between the US and USSR. Both powers are well-aware of their interdependencies and the Shakespearean nature of future geopolitics, with blurring fault lines, evident in the recent détente between two powers in the tariff war, microchips exports, and rare earth concessions.
For centuries, China’s internal geographical conflicts have been a major hurdle against its shift toward sea power in the Pacific. During the past two decades, however, massive networks of cyber infrastructure, bridges, roads, and railways—under a well-coordinated provincial development strategy, together with strong control measures—have rapidly integrated the historically problematic ethnic peripheries around the main Han Chinese territory.
These peripheries are critical for China’s agriculture and industry as well. Inner Mongolia in the North, the Bayan Obo Mining District hosts one of the largest rare-earth deposits in the world. The Tibetan Plateau in the Southwest is Asia’s water tower, and all three major river systems of China—the Yangtze River, Yellow River, and Mekong River—originate from Tibet. The Kashgar region in the Northwest is China’s gateway to Central Asia, Iran, and Pakistan.
Furthermore, China has successfully ingressed into the Eurasian landmass, with 237 bilateral and 24 multilateral projects being carried out in Central Asia and the South Caucasus, starting from Astana’s Light Rail project in Kazakhstan to Georgia’s Anaklia port. China has overcome the strategic limitations of being a land power only, like the USSR. It has consolidated its presence on critical oceanic junctions from the Black Sea to the Western Pacific. China’s shipbuilding and submarine programs are growing in leaps and bounds.
In addition to being a military equalizer to the West like the USSR, China’s economic soft power centers on a complex web of global supply chain dependency. Rich in strategic minerals, skilled manpower, and research and development, China produces everything the world needs—from electric vehicles to nuclear submarines, from microchip needles to spaceships.
A capable blue-water navy is inexorably important for China’s economic security, particularly in the Indo-Pacific, which is overwhelmed with the presence of the US-led Eastern alliance system from South Korea in the North to Australia in the South. Taiwan, being a democratic, US-friendly microchip hub, is the potential flashpoint for hard conflict between China and the USA due to its historical and geographical sensitivities.
The second major takeaway is the erosion of the Wilsonian principles and FDR’s multilateralism in American politics, as predicted by Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss many decades before. Donald Trump’s victory is a reaction to the rising inequality, deindustrialization of the American heartland, and decades of neo-liberal distortion in which procedures mattered more than delivery and linguistics more than understanding.
American Congress and journalism, both have lost Centre opinion—a green space essentially important to make good analysis leading to good decisions. American body politic is at extreme poles of far-right or liberal extremism, which is a sign of democratic instability.
During his second term, President Donald Trump has throttled a worldwide diplomatic offensive in a Shakespearean style, redefining friends and foes based on interpersonal and economic realism. His opponents view his statecraft against the constitutional ethos of American institutionalism. Nevertheless, he is taking the most consequential decisions of modern American history.
Donald Trump is aggressively implementing what he calls the ‘America First’ paradigm domestically through the Big and Beautiful Bill, launching massive AI and data center projects, border restrictions, strong federalism, and abroad by defying the WTO’s conventions on free trade, tariff twisting, mega investment deals with Gulf countries, championing peace deals in conflicts between India and Pakistan, Rwanda and the DRC, Hamas and Israel; however, at the same time, he is bombing Iran and expressing his own ambitions for territorial stretch from Greenland in the Northern Sea to Panama in the Caribbean.
Donald Trump’s post-modern relativist approach views international foundationalism as nothing more than a whisky hangover after the party is done. His worldview’s domino effects are felt across world capitals. The EU is trying to move in a united direction to de-escalate the spiral effects of the tit-for-tat tariff war with the US and also recalibrate its trade priorities with Southeast Asian economies and Central Asia to protect the rule-based trade order. Others are adjusting priorities to settle trade deals with the US, and in some cases, by switching leaders to counter the new reality, as seen in Canada. Some countries, like South Africa and Pakistan, are offering premature mineral deals and crypto revolutions to ride the tide from the right side.
As a result of constant pressure from Donald Trump, transatlantic treaty allies agreed to increase their defense budgets up to 5% of GDP till 2035. With this huge increase, NATO will become a tremendous force from the Baltic and North Sea in the North, the Mediterranean in the South, and the Bosphorus straits in the East.
As the Ukraine-Russia war is overstretched, Russia is comparatively paying a higher cost for its age-old strategic romance with Sevastopol and ensuring NATO’s absence in the flat-land buffer comprising Belarus and Ukraine; anything east of the Carpathian Mountains. NATO knows this, and therefore, there is a large consensus in Europe to support Ukrainians by using all means. Donald Trump’s drive to entice Vladimir Putin is nearing exhaustion, as both minds operate on different levels.
Russia’s performance in Ukraine will have effects on countries where Russia has developed influence through media and corporate interventions, Private Military Companies, and low-cost intermediaries. The war outcomes will impact the domestic politics of Estonia in the Baltic to Bulgaria in the Balkans, further south to Sahel region countries in Central Africa.
The US bombing on Iran, a critical Russian security ally and member of BRICS and SCO, and getting away signaled to Russia’s sympathizers that the US with its airpower and NATO’s eight multilingual battlegroups forward deployed in the Alliance’s eastern flank has a capacity to manifest hard power, not flags only, unless the Pacific becomes the battlefield and China kicks in.
The third significant takeaway is the general enfeeblement of the rule-based, institutional architecture designed to govern the world system. It was put in place 80 years ago by the devastated generations of the 20th century after fighting two great wars and witnessing the most tragic scenarios of human history.
The Security Council’s failure to prevent the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Israel’s indiscriminate, brutal bombing on Gaza killing thousands of unarmed civilians, India’s attack on Pakistan, and the US and Israel’s unilateral decision to launch an aerial attack on Iran’s nuclear sites are clear indicators of a systemic lack of method and might in the UN enterprise to implement its binding conventions on dispute resolution, territorial sovereignty, and preservation of human life and dignity.
Though the UN architecture has coordinated well during the 2008 global financial crisis and Covid-19 pandemic, the two great global challenges humanity faced during the last 25 years. Its current morale and state of preparedness to deal with such challenges in the future are in serious question.
As a logical consequence, the fourth takeaway is newfound regionalism in Central Asia, South East Asia, Africa, and the Gulf. Countries are instrumenting uncertainties through integration based on territorial proximity and like-mindedness. They are preparing to absorb external shocks due to superpowers’ unpredictable politics. Modernization of free trade agreements in ASEAN countries internally and with China, SCO’s restructuring, and massive expansion of GCC’s initiatives for internal integration and with Central Asia and ASEAN countries are a few examples.
All these four takeaways above predict an anxious system of power in the second quarter of the 21st century. The question is how this multipolar architecture will transfigure itself for a united response to face the 21st century realities, which are much bigger, impersonal, and imperial in nature?
Freshwater reservoirs are depleting worldwide. Climate Change impacts like Jet stream variations, glacier melting, flash floods, droughts, and wildfires are testing and breaking the adaptive limits of the human species. Drastic rise in human population in megacities, inequality, migrations, and debt crisis on squeezed distances, where no crisis is isolated due to cyber and ballistic war machines.
Can humans afford repaying the cost to learn what their fathers learned at the expense of millions of deaths after the two great wars—that institutions are predictable, individuals are not? Are strong individuals stationed in Washington, Beijing, Kremlin, and their firepower allies willing to carve out a transformative consensus to handle power on this planet, or otherwise, will they use it in a Shakespearean way with a “to be or not to be” future for this planet?
The Author is a columnist and member of UNFCCC and ICAN. He taught Public Policy in the National Defence University of Pakistan.
