Changing world and shifting geostrategic construct

Wars have traditionally redefined the international order. The year 2025, as it ends, is marked by one of the longest wars in Europe's heartland in Ukraine, also a proxy conflict between the US/Europe, and Russia/China on the other side. The advent of nuclear weapons discourages great powers from a direct military confrontation; hence they fight through proxies. Middle East still suffers from uneasy peace under Israeli recalcitrance, genocide and unmatched cruelty in Gaza. That conflict, also reaching Lebanon, Yemen and Syria, is hardly settled. In June, the flames of Gaza reached Iran too.

In South Asia, the Indo-Pakistan rivalry is a simmering nuclear tinderbox, one event away from military confrontation. Pakistan is also fighting its own war on terrorism and separatism. In Southeast Asia, pacifist and Buddhist Thailand and Cambodia are in conflict. Haiti, Mexico and most of the Latin America suffer from gang violence.

In Africa, Darfur in Sudan reels under militia brutality. Libya is stabilising in uncertain ways. Congo still battles insurgency and criminal groups. Ethiopia confronts political instability and internal conflict. Sahel Region (Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger) suffers violence from Islamist extremist groups and rebel factions.

Unlike the traditional conflicts, today's wars are more complex, involving proxy elements; and are characterised by shifting alliances, internal fractures connecting armed militant groups; and have high societal impact and civilian casualties. There are more armed conflicts today than there were 15 years ago. And these wars, more than any other factor responsible, are mostly initiated and sustained by meddlesome great powers. Conflicts result into shifting alliances, hedging strategies by middle powers like India, and slowly gravitate a unipolar world towards multipolarity, that remains the bedrock of China's strategic aspiration.

Military involvement of the hegemon, the US, to use the Realist phraseology in International Relations sets in the law of diminishing returns, gradually eroding Washington's military-industrial potential. While rival China, through its BRI reach and influence, through its peaceful technical and technological rise, and through its rising economic power can devote substantial resources to augment its military power and reach; the US-Europe Combine faces insurmountable economic and geostrategic challenges to compete and overmatch Beijing. Although one disagrees with the notion that China prepares for an inevitable showdown, the US and West continue to prop such bogies for domestic political and geostrategic reasons.

The hegemon, according to a recent New York Times report, continues to lose against China in every wargame conducted by Pentagon, as acknowledged by Secretary of War Peter Hegseth. Ramping up its defence spending to $1 trillion by 2026, America continues to invest in large platforms like aircraft carriers, heavy bombers and other sluggish military hardware and software, which can be easily neutralised by commercially available, of-the-shelf technologies like armed drones and ability to cut undersea cables, etc. The US has yet to deploy a single hypersonic missile; and China's ability to insert difficult-to-remove malware in the power grids, communication systems and water supply systems is causing sleepless nights for the US/Allied Cybersecurity specialists. The shrinking of US defence contractor pool from 51 in the early 1990s to just 5 recently, the NYT report concludes, compels Pentagon to invest in archaic, expensive and complex platforms that reinforce 'old ways' of fighting wars.

Similarly, the US has spent almost one quarter of its stockpile of high-altitude missile-interceptors in helping Israel defend against Iranian missile-done barrages during the 12 days of war. High-calibre artillery and other conventional munitions used excessively in Ukraine and Gaza, are not easily replenishable due to capped industrial production in the West Plus.

AI is shaping the future of warfare and the global order in yet to be determined ways. The US National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency collects, collates and analyses Petaton's space-based intelligence through its 'Maven' programme deployed worldwide in US command HQs. AI-based Maven can identify military objects and suggest targets. Military collaboration with defence production startups like Palantir and Anduril produces AI-based drones, for example. Consequently, America has drifted away from its core ethos of deterring wars, to starting wars. It is another issue that each US drone is covered by multiple AI-based Chinese counter systems like robotic wingmen, extending the battlefield.

With the looming threat of dehumanisation of war under AI, non-regulation of AI; bioterrorism (fast spreading deadly viruses); and the emergence of autonomous weapons by 2026, it is 'feared' that the speed of war will outpace the human ability to control it.

Other drivers of global instability (also contributing to warfare) are identified as the rise of emerging powers, growing rejection of traditional 'rules-based' norms and rapid technological disruption. Technology is no longer a 'neutral tool', and technological supremacy in AI is a primary driver of zero-sum competition. Winning the race to pursuing semiconductors, synthetic biology, quantum computing and nanotechnologies is considered vital to safeguard national security and economic growth.

Major world institutions, the UN, IMF, WTO and WB, established to ensure global stability and Western dominance per se, are facing deadlocks and loss of legitimacy. Global South is trying to institute yuan-based Chinese payment system through alternative structures, like the 'New Development Bank' under BRICS, away from the petrodollar.

Regional middle powers like Saudi Arabia, Türkiye, Indonesia, etc are increasingly moving independently to form 'transactional alliances' away from 'traditional blocs'. Primary values in governance are shifting from 'universal liberal democratic values' to 'state sovereignty and civilizational diversity'. In economics, the globalised free markets and Bretton Woods system are giving way to techno-nationalism and regional trade blocs. Multilateral alliances like NATO are gradually shifting towards complex networks and fluid coalitions.

In the regional perspectives, the nations of Global South (Africa and Southwest Asia) are going beyond 'managed dependency' to collaborate under greater 'African agency' and regional coherence, through African Union and ECO. The US, under Trump, is a paradox, as it turns inwards under populist politics, shunning trans-Atlantic Alliance with Europe; and maintains 'alliance advantage' elsewhere over rivals by forcefully interceding, at the same time. Russia, India and China advocate 'multipolarity', away from Western values, that impose universal standards on others.

Hence, increased turbulence and conflict-intensity would unravel the old norms, before fully setting up the new ones. Merry Christmas!