Shaping up the future world

During past weeks, we debated American unilateralism and identified dominant trends likely to shape our world, in Op-eds titled, "Changing world and shifting geostrategic construct" and "International Trends – Extending the Argument" published in this space on December 25, 2025 and January 1, 2026, respectively. In a series of essays in The New York Times, titled "The World Is in Chaos. What Comes Next?", International Relations (IR) experts have discussed the following five aspects of the future, as they see it.

Adam Tooze talks about the energy politics coming into foreplay. Monica Duffy Toft talks about the world getting split into three spheres. Matias Spektor debates the rise of Global South as a defining trend. Rush Doshi talks about the receding US power against a resurgent China. And Margaret MacMillan predicts continued chaos in our future world.

In energy politics, the conversion of dreadnought battleships, from coal to oil fuel, ushered in the age of oil power, continuing to this day. Oil power makes USA, the largest global oil producer, the present hegemon. However, that dominance is challenged by a resurgent China, where continued industrial R&D by an army of scientists is helping undo western supremacy. China's unchallenged leadership in Green Energy is enhancing its state power and global influence.

Beijing, the giant fossil energy power, still relies on coal, but coal unlike oil, is not controlled by the US, so that puts in context, the noise about the US-inspired Venezuelan oil cuts impeding China's march forward. China is also converting industrial electricity from coal-fired to green energy, encouraging and subsidising private innovative investment in batteries and solar panels. Hence, coal instead of oil, and substitution of coal with cleaner energy, helps China's potential rise. This unequal competition between Sino-US energy giants, favours China and would shape the new world order.

Monica Duffy Toft's piece: "The World Splits in Three", draws from IR euphemism that 'great powers must expand or die'. She predicts influence zones, China and its militarised South China Sea; the US, Americas and Greenland; and the rest. The new normal seems an emerging world where "great powers seek domination without rules, limits or agreed boundaries. It is sphere logic without sphere discipline." And unlike the recent past, the emerging influence-spheres, instead, spell instability.

All three leaders, China's Xi, America's Trump and Russia's Putin are revisionist, believing in 'muscular, militarily coercive foreign policy'. But unlike the past, none of them can retain dominance without alliance power, requiring 'overlapping networks' to maintain power. That America's isolationist retreat is already diminishing its power. Moreover, events like pandemics, climate change, weaponised AI, global commons, cyberattacks and transnational terrorism need international cooperation; and that collaboration is withering.

Matias Spektor in "The Global South Pushes Back" sees great power politics returning to the familiar pattern of 'coercion, intervention, and hierarchy'. Inspired by notions of 'Realist Theory', he claims the cited powers are competing for trade routes and political alignments, using 'tools' that were beyond the legal restraints of post-Cold War era. That erstwhile colonised countries (India, Brazil, South Africa and Iran etc) 'share a political grammar forged by [Western] domination and resistance'. And these nations fiercely defend their sovereignty, as a hard-won asset.

Global South, through improvable unity, is beginning to define its power not in ideology, but in multipolarity, in hedging, and in transactional (if transient) alliances of benefit, in future world, where 'supply chains, payment systems, energy flows, data networks and food markets' are instruments of pressure and power, and interdependence is weaponised. He posits, 'influence travels through markets and infrastructure as well as through armies.'

Professor Matias believes exercise of power by the great powers would, like always, invite resistance. Great powers' military, economic or technological coercion would invite Global South's backlash through selective compliance and strategic ambiguity besides 'quieter obstruction through delay, dilution'. The next world order, hence, would be unstable, rougher, improvisational and more contested.

Professor Rush Doshi in his "America Cedes the Stage to China" discusses Washington's renewed interest in Americas, in its near abroad. But domination of the Americas does not geo-strategically help the US, as the region has just around 13% of global population and receding economic and manufacturing capacity. Asia, by comparison, gets fewer resources, and this most populous and economically dynamic region is virtually ceded to Chinese influence.

He cites pursuit of "Fortress America" by Trump Administration being 'no refuge against China'. And America's recent 'imperial adventures' (Venezuela, Greenland, Canada, Panama Canal, Iran, etc) afflict it with strategic overstretch, when rival China quietly edges forward in technologies of the future like AI, robotics, quantum computing and biotechnology.

Repeating an old argument, the professor recommends America to balance China's sheer scale by the collective power of the US and its alliance partners. But the row over Greenland can tear apart US alliances, like NATO. There is hence a real possibility of a more focused Beijing, bracing to replace Washington, the sole hegemon.

Historian Margaret MacMillan, in her piece "Expect Continued Chaos", starts by stating that the predictable international order that made the West Plus complacent is in 'bad shape, perhaps fatally so'. She describes the present times, after the Trumpian upheavals, as 'radical uncertainty'; the world in transition; and an older order unravelling, without a clear replacement in sight. She recommends bracing ourselves for prolonged volatility as predictability is past us, and there being too many disruptive elements at work, like unpredictable electorates, trade wars, AI, aging populations and warming planet, etc. Revisionist powers, she laments, redefine rules to their advantage, causing effects like nuclear proliferation or militarising of space, etc.

That current crop of global leadership is woefully inept at coping well with multifarious challenges. Modi, for example, is good in erecting monuments of glory, but short on service delivery and prosperity.

So, in this ensuing unpredictable world, order would be replaced with hotspots, ushering great power competition to defend their exclusive spheres of influence. Smaller powers would look for patronage and shift allegiance seeking better deals. And the constant jockeying may draw in great powers on behalf of their protégés, accidently starting wars.

In this analytical fog, something big has happened, and something bigger is coming!