Geostrategic Media Political Commentary, Analysis, Security, Defense
The world is entering an era where conflict is no longer an exception but has become a permanent thread running through international relations. In this sense, the contemporary global order is not merely in transition; it is tilting into a zone of turbulence where regional wars, great power rivalries, and unprecedented alliances intertwine to shape an uncertain future. The war in Ukraine, with more than 500,000 military and civilian casualties according to Western estimates, has reintroduced to European soil the brutal logic of high-intensity warfare that many believed was consigned to the 20th century. At the same time, in Gaza, the clashes unleashed in 2023, already causing more than 40,000 deaths, have raised the specter of a regional conflagration that could draw in other actors determined to reshape the Middle East. Further east, the Sino-American standoff over Taiwan is intensifying. Beijing has raised its military budget to nearly $230 billion (+16% in 2024), while Washington maintains a colossal $886 billion defense effort, crystallizing a naval, technological, and strategic rivalry that is already reshaping the Indo-Pacific. Beyond these visible flashpoints, other regions are also experiencing mounting tensions. In Latin America, the rise of social unrest, the weakening of democratic institutions, and Sino-American competition over strategic resources, from lithium to the Amazon, are revealing new fractures. In Africa, conflict has reached alarming proportions. Terrorism continues to expand across the Sahel and the Gulf of Guinea, with more than 7,800 deaths linked to jihadist violence in 2023, according to the Africa Center for Strategic Studies. Meanwhile, a succession of coups has shaken Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, and Gabon in less than three years.
Compounding this is the growing impact of climate change, which directly threatens food security. More than 130 million Africans currently face severe food insecurity, while nearly 20 million people have been displaced within the continent by wars and instability, particularly in the Horn of Africa, Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. At the same time, contests for influence among external powers, Russia, China, the United States, the European Union, and Turkey, are multiplying, while the militarization of rivalries around energy, mineral, and maritime corridors (the Gulf of Guinea, the Red Sea, and the Mozambique Channel) illustrates Africa’s entry into an increasingly globalized conflict dynamic.
These flashpoints are not isolated. They are embedded in a systemic competition between established and revisionist powers, undermining the liberal order that had prevailed since the end of the Cold War. Samuel Huntington predicted in The Clash of Civilizations (1996) that 21st-century conflicts would be structured around cultural and civilizational fault lines. Yet what we witness today is even more complex. Economic, energy, and technological interdependencies themselves have been transformed into instruments of coercion and rivalry. Francis Fukuyama, in The End of History and the Last Man (1992), proclaimed the definitive triumph of the liberal model. The present, however, reveals quite the opposite: its progressive erosion. John Mearsheimer, through his theory of offensive realism, offers a sharper lens on contemporary dynamics, showing that each great power seeks to establish regional hegemony—Moscow in its “near abroad,” Beijing in the South China Sea, and Washington across the Atlantic—at the expense of global stability.
Yet a purely realist framework, however illuminating, cannot capture the full complexity of the era. The constructivist paradigm reminds us that rivalries are not only fueled by material power struggles but also by intangible factors. The rise of civilizational nationalism in Russia and China, the narrative of “de-Westernization” championed by the Global South, and the clash of values between liberal democracies and autocracies shape perceptions and radicalize positions. In this light, it is striking that the institutions of the liberal order, though eroded, remain resilient. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) continues to play a central role in the Iranian nuclear file, while the Paris Climate Agreement still provides an arena of cooperation, generating a permanent tension between the logic of power and the imperatives of the common good.
This global rivalry, of course, carries profound consequences. Its economic impact is just as decisive. According to the IMF, global inflation, which reached 8.8% in 2022, remains high across many emerging economies. Global public debt now exceeds 97% of world GDP, up from 84% in 2019. This deterioration is worsened by the financialization of conflict: economic sanctions, deployed as a geoeconomic weapon against Russia and Iran, are driving financial realignments and encouraging the creation of parallel payment systems, fragmenting the global economic space. At the same time, strategic competition accelerates “de-risking” and “friend-shoring” of supply chains, especially in semiconductors and energy transition sectors, raising costs and fueling inflationary pressures. Public finances are also increasingly absorbed by militarization. Russia devotes more than 7% of its GDP to the war effort, while global military expenditures surpassed $2.4 trillion in 2023 (SIPRI). These fiscal imbalances are feeding major social tensions across most countries. The World Bank estimates that 70 million additional people have fallen into extreme poverty since 2020, undermining social contracts and increasing the risks of political instability. George Kennan had emphasized during the Cold War that the strategic solidity of a state rests as much on internal cohesion as on military capacity. The present era offers a stark confirmation of that lesson.
Alongside this classical conflict dynamic, a new trend has emerged. It is embodied in the formation of alliances that, until recently, seemed inconceivable. Saudi Arabia, while preserving its security partnership with Washington, has tightened its military and potentially nuclear ties with Pakistan, signaling an unprecedented strategic diversification. The United Arab Emirates and Qatar, once locked in near-existential rivalry, now explore economic and security cooperation dictated by the need to stabilize their immediate environment. More broadly, Gulf monarchies, faced with regional uncertainty, may resort to strategies of energy, financial, or security coercion to bolster their autonomy and secure their borders. These realignments testify to a world where alliances have become fluid, transactional, and opportunistic, breaking with the rigidity of Cold War blocs.
This reconfiguration of alliances, however, extends beyond states. The emergence of non-state actors wielding comparable strategic power further complicates the picture. Technology firms, custodians of critical data and masters of digital infrastructure (submarine cables, cloud systems), have become sovereignty stakes and priority targets. Meanwhile, transnational criminal organizations exploit weaknesses in global governance to thrive, while diasporas and social movements, amplified by digital networks, in turn influence national diplomatic agendas. The worldwide mobilization surrounding the Gaza conflict is a striking illustration of this phenomenon.
Thus, this fluidity of coalitions transforms a fragile order into a tension-driven one. It enables improbable convergences, such as a tactical axis between Turkey and Russia in certain African theaters, an India–Gulf partnership around energy corridors, or ad hoc cooperation between competing powers to face common threats like maritime piracy, cyberattacks, or transnational crime. Yet such flexibility generates as many points of friction as of stabilization, multiplying risks of miscalculation and strategic misunderstanding. Paul Kennedy noted, when analyzing 1914, that “wars arise less from deliberate intentions than from poorly managed entanglements.” Today’s international system seems to be replaying that scenario, with dangers multiplied by the velocity of financial, technological, and informational flows.
In the background of this geopolitical conflict lies a set of structural transnational challenges that act as threat multipliers, rendering the system even harder to govern. Climate change, by provoking large-scale migration and intensifying competition over water and arable land, has become a direct driver of instability. Likewise, the absence of a normative framework for cybersecurity and military applications of artificial intelligence opens the door to an arms race in domains where the line between peace and war grows increasingly blurred. These global issues create a paradox that appears insurmountable: they demand international cooperation precisely as the mechanisms for such cooperation are disintegrating.
Within this context, three prospective scenarios emerge. The first is one of uncontrolled escalation, where the intersection of opportunistic alliances triggers a regional conflagration, in the Middle East or the South China Sea, that quickly spreads globally. The second is one of lasting fragmentation into competing spheres of influence, marked by volatile alliances, constant economic rivalry, and recurrent financial shocks, generating a condition akin to a globalized Cold War. The third is one of pragmatic rebalancing, in which states, constrained by the exorbitant cost of conflict, reconstruct a functional multipolarism built on thematic cooperation in areas such as climate, cybersecurity, energy, and artificial intelligence. As Henry Kissinger once observed, “World order is never given; it must always be constructed.” The future will therefore depend on whether the great powers can transform today’s fluidity into regulated architecture rather than allow it to devolve into permanent chaos.
In the end, it seems clear that the fate of the world will be written at the intersection of two contradictory trends: the acceleration of rivalries or the urgency of shared governance. While the present is dominated by conflictuality and the erosion of certainties, the future could see the emergence of a new “interregnum,” where instability becomes the norm and peace the fragile exception. The central question is no longer whether the world will return to a stable balance, but whether it can invent a new form of coexistence built on fluid alliances, sectoral regulations, and constant adaptation. From this perspective, the 21st century will not be the “end of history,” as Fukuyama once believed, but rather an accelerated history in which civilizations, states, and societies must relearn how to navigate permanent uncertainty. Ultimately, humanity, standing at the threshold of a tension-driven order, faces a stark choice: to transform disorder into governance or to let the future be written under the sign of chaos.
