Multipolarity

This content was translated using artificial intelligence and may therefore contain errors.

Who will be the new United States?

As the planet heads toward the middle of the 21st century, the landscape is far removed from what it was in the middle of the 20th century: in the foreseeable future, there is no longer a power capable of achieving global hegemony as the U.S. did after the Cold War. Instead, we find a concert of great powers gradually dividing the world into spheres of influence. And as internal pressures, imperial overstretch, and an unfavorable shift in the global balance of power put U.S. hegemony in check, Washington will be forced to undertake a strategic withdrawal, with much of its global influence dissipating in the process.

This scenario raises two major questions. On the one hand, a complex process of reconfiguring the international chessboard of power is unfolding and will continue until a new geopolitical equilibrium emerges, this time a multipolar one. What exact shape that chessboard will take, we do not know. On the other hand, serious doubts arise about the continuity of a globalized economy, which until now has been made possible by U.S. naval supremacy. The most likely scenario facing global logistics networks in the event of a U.S. withdrawal would be a relatively anarchic transition period in which different powers vie for their respective zones of maritime control. Once this complex process is over, the world would find itself in completely uncharted territory for global economic integration.

If the scenario described above were to materialize, the U.S. would lose its superpower status, but that would not mean Washington would suffer a sudden collapse or a substantial degradation of its absolute capabilities, since superpower is a relative category. A good definition comes from André Munro, who has defined it in the Encyclopaedia Britannica as “a country whose capabilities are such that no major action can be taken on the international stage without considering its position.” The proliferation of armed conflicts the world has witnessed in the 2020s reflects the transition period we are in: the relative decline of the United States has already begun, although a truly multipolar world has yet to take shape.

In recent years, the term new Cold War has been coined to describe the current situation of relative U.S. decline and China's rise. However, this characterization is mistaken, as it seems to ignore the profoundly multipolar nature of the era now taking shape.

Although every historical comparison is inexact in some respect, I believe a more useful parallel might be found in late 19th century Europe: a geopolitical landscape inhabited by half a dozen great powers. None was powerful enough to impose its will on the rest, but each had the tools at its disposal to defend its fundamental interests against advances by one or more of its rivals.

With this in mind, the question “who will be the new United States?” has a clear answer: there will be no new United States, and not even the United States will remain the United States.

With that in mind, the following pages offer a survey of the leading great powers and secondary powers taking their places around the global chessboard, to shed a little light on the likely rules of the game in the 21st century.

China

For some years now, the phrase “China is the future” has been repeated in academic, political, and journalistic circles. The phrase refers to the possibility that China could become the world's largest economy in the coming decades. But in many ways, China is not the future: China is the present.

With a GDP estimated by the IMF at more than 20 trillion dollars in 2026, the People's Republic of China already accounts for one-sixth of the global economy and is two-thirds the size of the U.S. economy. One key sector where Beijing has become an undisputed powerhouse is the automotive industry. In 2024, around one-third of the 92 million cars produced worldwide were made in China, almost as many as in the next five largest car-producing countries combined. This figure becomes even more impressive when we consider that Chinese dominance in electric cars is even more pronounced: that same year, China produced around 70% of all electric cars worldwide, while its closest competitor, the European Union, did not reach 14%.

Similarly, China has recently made great strides in other advanced fields. DeepSeek was probably the most visible sign of China's leap forward in artificial intelligence, but it is far from an isolated case. Companies such as Alibaba, with its Qwen model, Moonshot AI, with Kimi, and Zhipu AI, with GLM, are part of an increasingly competitive ecosystem. One of its distinctive features is its commitment to open-weight models, which allows companies, universities, individual users, and even countries to deploy and even adapt them without relying on the closed systems of a handful of Western companies. Advances in artificial intelligence are part of a much broader technological ambition. The 15th Five-Year Plan, which covers the period from 2026 to 2030, also identifies biomanufacturing, quantum computing, hydrogen and nuclear fusion, brain-computer interfaces, and 6G communications as industries of the future, while prioritizing areas such as robotics, new materials, biomedicine, alternative energy sources, and aerospace technologies. Viewed together, these bets begin to look less like a collection of isolated technologies and more like the deliberate construction of a new industrial base.

However, despite already being an established great power with ample room for further development, China faces numerous geopolitical challenges that will make it difficult to become a global power in the coming decades. To begin with, China occupies a complex geographic position, sharing borders with fourteen countries,¹⁷North Korea, Russia, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Nepal, Bhutan, Myanmar, Laos, and Vietnam. four of them nuclear powers: North Korea, Russia, Pakistan, and India, and lying in close maritime proximity to Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Malaysia.

Added to this delicate geographic reality is the curious fact that contemporary China finds itself in a situation unprecedented in its history. Despite regularly ranking among the world's leading powers over the past two millennia, China has always been characterized by an extraordinary degree of self-sufficiency. However, relinquishing this autonomy was the price the Middle Kingdom had to pay to embark on its meteoric rise over the past half-century.

The Reform and Opening-Up Policy¹⁸The Reform and Opening-Up Policy was a program of sweeping economic and trade reforms launched in late 1978 by China's then leader and Mao Zedong's successor, Deng Xiaoping. Broadly speaking, it was characterized by an opening to trade, the introduction of private ownership of the means of production, the promotion of a consumer society, and a growth model based on increasing exports. Within a few years of its launch, this strategy set in motion the most rapid process of economic development in human history. In short, it was the policy that turned China into the economic superpower and “world's factory” we know today. and the export-led growth model that turned China into the “world's factory” came with a trade-off, creating an Achilles' heel: today, the health of China's economy is tied to the health of the global economy. In fact, never in history has China's relationship with the global economy been so symbiotic. To keep growing, China must keep exporting. To keep exporting, China must keep importing. China is the world's leading importer of numerous resources, including oil and food, but China does not control the world's oceans. The power that still controls the oceans is its main rival, the United States.

If Washington were to impose a total naval blockade on the People's Republic of China (particularly along the vital trade artery that is the Strait of Malacca), Beijing would face an extremely precarious logistical situation, with limited options for a conventional response. To understand this complex strategic reality, we need to distinguish between the concepts of power and power projection.

Briefly, we can define power as all the resources a state has at its disposal to compete and fight on the international stage: population, armed forces, natural resources, technological capacity, productive capacity, and so on. Power projection, on the other hand, is the maximum distance beyond its borders at which a state can deploy its power effectively. For example, it would be reasonable to say that Japan is a more powerful country than Peru: it has four times the population, its economy is twelve times as large, and its armed forces are far better equipped and funded. This is power. But Japan is incapable of conquering Peru. Quite simply, Tokyo does not have the logistical capacity to load its army onto a fleet, cross 15,000 kilometers of the Pacific Ocean, land in a country of 1.2 million square kilometers through which the Andes mountain range runs, and maintain effective supply lines until it has subjugated a population of 35 million people on the other side of planet Earth. That is a limitation on its power projection.

Something similar is happening today with the People's Republic of China. China is a colossally powerful country whose power-projection capabilities remain limited. Nevertheless, acutely aware of its delicate geopolitical situation, Beijing has chosen to maintain an extremely cautious stance on the international stage while pursuing a three-pronged strategy to escape its labyrinth.

First, as I mentioned in chapter 1, China has pursued a sustained expansion of its naval capabilities. Over the past fifteen years, the People's Liberation Army Navy has added three aircraft carriers (the Liaoning, the Shandong and the Fujian), while construction has already begun on a fourth, the Type 004. These qualitative leaps in its naval capabilities have been accompanied by clear quantitative growth: since 2020, the People's Republic of China has had the world's largest fleet of combat vessels (although it should be noted that it remains far below the U.S. fleet in terms of tonnage). This naval expansion is complemented by a comprehensive modernization of the Armed Forces, a sustained emphasis on increasing combat readiness, recurring military exercises and qualitative leaps in its weapons systems (exemplified by the production of J-20 fifth-generation fighter aircraft, “carrier-killer” DF-21D missiles and stealth GJ-11 drones, among others).

Second, these military developments are accompanied by massive investments in civilian infrastructure, both domestic and international. Domestically, China has undertaken an immense expansion of various forms of renewable energy to reduce its external dependence. Internationally, the Belt and Road Initiative serves a clear strategic as well as commercial purpose. China's titanic infrastructure project, whose ramifications are global but whose central hub lies in the heart of Eurasia, would secure Beijing's overland access to resources and markets in Europe, the Middle East and Central Asia, while its maritime branch, particularly the planned corridors through Pakistan and Myanmar, provides direct access to the Indian Ocean, bypassing Malacca altogether and, therefore, any potential U.S. blockade.

Finally, Beijing currently exercises effective control over and/or asserts sovereignty claims to a series of archipelagos stretching from the South China Sea to southern Japan, collectively known as the First Island Chain. In recent years, the People's Republic of China has vigorously strengthened its presence on these islands, building infrastructure for civilian and military use. This strategy, which could be described as a “great blue wall”, would turn the China Seas into a vast “Chinese lake” and allow it to project power over 1,500-2,000 kilometers and transform the balance of power in the Western Pacific.

Should it complete this convergent three-pronged strategy, the People's Republic of China would find its way out of its geopolitical labyrinth and eliminate the existential threat that currently hangs over it like the sword of Damocles. However, this requires the incorporation of a key piece without which this entire security architecture would collapse: the island of Taiwan.

Since the end of the Chinese Civil War (1945-1949), which culminated in the victory of Mao Zedong's socialist troops and the founding of the People's Republic of China, the Asian giant has been caught in a stalled but incomplete process of national unification. After its defeat by Mao on mainland China, the Nationalist Party, the Guomindang, relocated its troops and government to the island of Taiwan in the late 1940s and has remained there ever since. Thus, formally speaking, two organizations claim to be the sole legitimate government of all China: the People's Republic of China, which encompasses more than 99% of the territory and 98% of the population, and the Republic of China, which controls the island of Taiwan and surrounding archipelagos and enjoys only a tiny and dwindling measure of international recognition.

Beyond Taiwan's profound symbolic and political significance for Beijing, its strategic importance makes it an imperative. With no political solution within the current horizon of expectations, the Taiwan question will remain the principal potential conflict scenario between China and the U.S. for the foreseeable future.

Although the prospect of an open Sino-American war opens up a range of possibilities that are essentially impossible to predict, each year that war is avoided tips the balance of power a little further in Beijing's favor. Nevertheless, even in the hypothetical case of a decisive defeat for Washington (or a less dramatic strategic withdrawal), the consolidation of the People's Republic of China as the hegemonic power in East Asia and the Western Pacific would not make Beijing lord and master of the planet. This is because the expansion of Chinese influence will increasingly be challenged by the rise of the other Asian giant: the Republic of India.

India

Like China, India is a millennia-old civilization on a continental scale. It is currently the world's seventh-largest country by area (excluding regions that were historically part of India, such as Pakistan and Bangladesh), the fifth-largest economy (it is projected to end this decade as the third-largest) and the most populous country (its 1.4 billion inhabitants have surpassed China's population, and another 200 million are expected to be added by mid-century). Although its growth has been more gradual than that of its northern neighbor and it still has a long way to go, its development is accelerating. Despite having a per capita GDP of 2,800 dollars, it has a middle class (by local standards) of some 400 million people, produces 1.5 million engineers a year, and has a substantial manufacturing and technological base, a robust military-industrial complex and a nuclear arsenal that is nothing to scoff at.

Moreover, its location at the center of the Indian Ocean gives it the opportunity to become a considerable naval power: its proximity to three of the world's most sensitive straits (Hormuz, Bab el-Mandeb and Malacca) gives it a key geopolitical card to play as the relative decline of U.S. power deepens. If it continues on its current trajectory, it is only a matter of decades before India becomes lord and master of its namesake, the Indian Ocean.

Considering its historical relationship with China (which, apart from a brief honeymoon in the 1950s, has oscillated between mutual distrust and open antagonism), New Delhi's transformation into a great power represents a significant strategic challenge for Beijing. This does not mean that the People's Republic of China does not have a couple of cards to play. In addition to its considerable lead in technological and economic development, China has a major geographical ace up its sleeve. Although the two countries are separated by the Himalayas, not all sides of the mountains are equal: the Tibetan Plateau on the Chinese side gives rise to a very important river (known as the Yarlung Tsangpo in the People's Republic of China and as the Brahmaputra on the Indian subcontinent). In India and Bangladesh, an estimated 100 million people depend on the Brahmaputra for their survival. Meanwhile, on its side of the border, China is building what promises to be the world's most powerful hydroelectric dam. In the energy sector, few projects are as geopolitically sensitive as dams, since they give upstream countries the ability both to cut off the water supply and to suddenly flood countries downstream.

Beyond its rivalry with China, India's main problems lie much closer to home. On the one hand, its historical enmity with Pakistan is far from finding any kind of political solution on the horizon, and each of their recurring direct clashes¹⁹The Indo-Pakistani wars of 1947-1948, 1965 and 1971, the Kargil War in 1999, and the conflicts of 2019 and 2025. carries the risk of spiraling out of control and escalating to the nuclear level. On the other hand, New Delhi faces numerous secessionist movements, such as the Kashmiri independence movement²⁰Kashmir is a region in the northwest of the Indian subcontinent inhabited by a people with a distinct cultural, ethnic and linguistic identity who are currently divided between India and Pakistan. While the region is disputed territory between the two countries and a perennial potential flashpoint, a local independence movement adds another dimension, making the area one of India's most politically sensitive places. and the proposed Sikh state of Khalistan.²¹Khalistan is a separatist project that seeks to establish an independent state for the Sikh community, whose religion originated in northwestern India and which established an empire that lasted from 1799 to 1849, when it was conquered by the British. Added to this is its greatest internal problem: its unresolved tensions with a Muslim minority of more than 200 million people, tensions that have only intensified under Narendra Modi's Hindu nationalist government.

Middle East

While it can be said with some degree of probability that in the near future the China Seas will be Chinese and the Indian Ocean will be Indian, it is harder to predict which of all the countries in the middle of the Middle East will successfully navigate its current predicament. Iran can never be ruled out as a regional power, if only for the simple fact that it has been one for most of the past 2,000 years. This is due both to its extraordinary cultural strength and to its geography: a vast territory that is extremely difficult to invade, located at one of the world's most strategically sensitive points. However, the collapse of its network of local alliances in the first half of the 2020s, its economic malaise and the considerable damage inflicted on it by the Israeli-American onslaught of 2026 cast doubt on the timeline of its recovery.

As for the fate of the Arab countries, the outlook is not promising. The country that should be their natural leader by virtue of its historical influence, demographic weight, and strategic location—Egypt—has been in a kind of geopolitical coma since the 1978 Camp David Accords, when it established relations with Israel. As a way of ensuring the agreement's durability, the U.S. has since provided Egypt with an annual subsidy of some $1.3 billion for its Armed Forces. Domestically, al-Sisi's increasingly indebted government has failed to address severe macroeconomic problems that are eroding the quality of life of its more than 100 million citizens, while it continues to build its massive new capital.

In the absence of clear Egyptian hegemony, the Gulf countries, foremost among them Saudi Arabia, have vied for leadership, but their oil-dependent economies have proved to be a flimsy foundation for projecting power, particularly after the 2026 Hormuz war. Although the historical perspective needed to assess this conflict's long-term effects is still lacking, the illusion that the Gulf economies were somehow insulated from the region's high levels of conflict has been decisively dispelled, especially after such clear-cut events as the plunge in property values in Dubai or the drone attacks on Amazon-owned data centers in the region.

Israel

The multidimensional crisis in the Middle East has also put another of its regional powers, the State of Israel, in a precarious position, as it faces major challenges both external and internal. On the one hand, Tel Aviv is undergoing growing diplomatic isolation after having fought against (or attacked) half a dozen countries since the attack by the Hamas group on October 7, 2023. Added to this are the consequences of the Israeli-U.S. attack on Iran in 2026, which led to at least seven additional countries suffering Tehran's reprisals.²²Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Cyprus.

On the other hand, Israel faces a medium-term challenge with its current demographic trajectory. Although the 6.9 million Israeli Jews represented around 75 % of the national population in 2020, the country has an Arab Israeli minority of some 2 million people, which already accounts for one-fifth of the population and continues to grow steadily. Adding to this figure the roughly 5 million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank reveals a certain parity between the local Jewish and Arab populations; both are expected to roughly double in size by mid-century.

However, the potentially most significant demographic trend is unfolding within the Israeli Jewish community itself, specifically among the ultra-Orthodox sectors (also known as Haredis or Haredim). Although they remain a minority segment of the population (around 16 % of the Israeli Jewish population in 2016), their current demographic trends could make them a quarter of the country's total population by 2050, according to estimates by Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics. Given the Haredi community's relatively low participation in the labor market, academia, and the Armed Forces, this transformation, both quantitative and qualitative, poses a considerable challenge to Israel's internal cohesion.

In addition to its internal and regional challenges, Israel faces a global problem: its military might depends on Washington's support and, therefore, on the continuation of U.S. global power projection. In a scenario of potential U.S. retrenchment, Tel Aviv would find itself in a fragile geopolitical position, with few allies either within or outside the region. This scenario would in turn be aggravated by a considerable loss of political and diplomatic capital because of its actions in the so-called Gaza war since 2023, which has increasingly been denounced as genocide in a growing number of international forums, including the United Nations.

Turkey

In this complex regional landscape, there is one country that, thanks to its demographics (86 million inhabitants; the world's 18th most populous country), economy ($1.6 trillion in GDP; the world's 16th largest economy), geographical location, and military capabilities, has what it takes to emerge in the coming decades as one of the major secondary powers of the 21st century: the Republic of Turkey.

Contemporary Turkey, which celebrated its centenary this decade, is a country with multiple, complementary identities. It is both European and Asian. Its shores face both the Mediterranean Sea and the Black Sea, and it controls two of the world's most valuable straits, the Bosporus and the Dardanelles. Ankara projects power over both the Caucasus and the Balkans. It is both a Muslim and a secular country. It is part of the Middle East, but its Turkic character opens doors for it among its sister countries in Central Asia. It is heir to the Ottoman imperial legacy, was the custodian of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina for almost four centuries, and, until the empire's fall, the Ottoman sultans claimed for themselves the leadership of the Sunni world,²³Since early in its history, Islam has been divided predominantly into two major branches: Sunni and Shia. With a few notable exceptions, such as Iran and Iraq, Sunni Islam has always been the majority branch. holding the title of caliph.

On the domestic front, President Erdoğan's government recently took an important step toward internal pacification. In May 2025, Ankara secured the dissolution of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (better known as the PKK), thus ending a conflict that had dragged on since 1984 and claimed some 50,000 lives. Added to this is the fact that, in recent years, the world has witnessed a significant expansion of Turkish power projection across Asia and Africa. Since August 2016, Ankara has occupied stretches of northern Syria as part of its involvement in that country's civil war. This strategy bore fruit in December 2024, when its longtime enemy, Bashar al-Assad, was replaced by its new ally Ahmed al-Sharaa. In parallel, Turkey has maintained a continuous military presence in the Kurdish region of northern Iraq since 2018.

In two successive wars, in 2020 and 2023, its ally Azerbaijan, inhabited by a people who are also ethnically Turkic, decisively defeated Armenia, symbolically bringing an end to almost two centuries of Russian hegemony in the Caucasus. At the same time, current reports indicate that Turkey is moving toward normalizing relations with Armenia, a country with which it has historically been at odds since the Armenian genocide perpetrated by the Ottoman Empire in 1915.

Beyond its immediate borders, Ankara has maintained a military base in Qatar since 2015, opened Camp TURKSOM (its largest overseas base) in Somalia in 2017, intervened militarily in the Libyan civil war starting in January 2020, and has been successfully supporting the Sudanese Armed Forces in their civil war against the Rapid Support Forces (better known by their English acronym, RSF), which are backed by the UAE. This is crucial for Turkey, since it holds a lease on the former Ottoman port of Suakin for 99 years, ensuring its ability to project power over the Red Sea.

Taking all of this into account, it would not be wrong to say that, geopolitically, Turkey is in its best position since before the signing of the Peace of Karlowitz, which brought the Great Turkish War of 1683-1699 to a catastrophic conclusion for it. However, as was the case for its Ottoman predecessor, the greatest danger to present-day Turkey probably lies not in Asia or Africa, but in Europe.

Turkey's clearest source of tension is with neighboring Greece, a former part of the Ottoman Empire that gained its independence in 1821 and incorporated almost all the islands of the Aegean Sea in the 21st century, several of them practically bordering Asian Turkey. Under the provisions of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (to which Athens adheres, but Ankara does not), countries can have territorial waters extending up to 12 nautical miles, an arrangement that corners Turkey in the Aegean and has been a source of numerous tensions over the decades.

Added to this is the situation in Cyprus, an island with a mixed Greek-Turkish population that went from being part of the Ottoman Empire to a British colony before gaining its independence in 1960. The fear that Cyprus might end up joining Greece, further narrowing Turkey's scope for projecting power over the Eastern Mediterranean, led Ankara to invade the north of the island in 1974. There it founded the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, and to this day Turkey is the only country in the world that recognizes its existence.

In recent years, an economic factor has been added to these strategic considerations with the discovery of hydrocarbon deposits in the region's waters, which have increased the value and importance of the Eastern Mediterranean at a time when hydrocarbons from Russia and the Middle East have become less reliable. However, the tensions this has generated between Turkey, Greece, and other European countries have so far been subject to a clear constraint because of their NATO membership. And it is here, in the European Union, that the central issue lies.

European Union

Throughout the Cold War, Washington achieved ever greater levels of control over its European allies by serving as their guarantor of defense against the Soviet military superpower. In the years following the collapse of the USSR, far from withdrawing, the U.S. sought to expand that control by bringing ever more members into NATO and cornering a much weaker Russian Federation. However, as the world moves further into the 21st century, Washington has grown increasingly frustrated with its European allies and more reluctant to bear the ongoing costs of its supremacy over Europe.

In this sense, Donald Trump’s demand that his European allies devote up to 5 % of their respective GDPs to defense by 2035 is a logical response to the problem of imperial overstretch. Nevertheless, amid European discontent with growing U.S. political unpredictability, this short-sighted measure by Trump could have catastrophic consequences for U.S. hegemony in the long term. This is only exacerbated by Trump’s territorial expansionist ambitions: he has repeatedly spoken about annexing Greenland, a strategically vital territory that is part of the Kingdom of Denmark, a member of both the European Union and NATO.

As the costs of defending Europe rise, countries rearm and expand their productive capacities, and Washington continues to behave in erratic and antagonistic ways, it is only a matter of time before political leaders in Brussels, Paris, and Berlin ask themselves the following question: “What is the point of subordinating ourselves to the U.S. on the global geopolitical chessboard if we have to pay for our own weapons?”.

The response to this situation, in a scenario of sustained rearmament, relative U.S. decline, and a Russian military threat (which is proving manageable), will probably lead to the establishment of a European Union army. With a population of 450 million, a GDP of 23 trillion dollars, 4.2 million square kilometers, and the French nuclear arsenal, the European Union has the capabilities at its disposal to free itself from its strategic dependence on the U.S.

Nevertheless, the creation of a European Union army presents two immediate problems involving NATO members that are not members of the European Union and with which Brussels has points of tension. First, there is the previously mentioned Turkey, a country that sought European Union membership for decades only to see it postponed indefinitely. As it became increasingly apparent that Ankara’s future would not lie within the European system, Turkey began developing its complex strategic influence across Asia, Africa, and the Islamic world, moving away from the European Union’s strategic priorities and consolidating a qualitatively different relationship with Moscow, Brussels’ main enemy.

Second, we find the case of the United Kingdom, a country far more dependent on the U.S. than the rest of the continent, with an unresolved relationship with the European Union after Brexit and points of conflict with member states. Regarding the latter, three key points can be identified: Gibraltar, Northern Ireland, and Scotland. Gibraltar is a small but strategic British colonial enclave located in the southern Iberian Peninsula, at the gateway to the Mediterranean, and long claimed by Spain. Because of the particularities of the case, Gibraltar was left out of the 2020 Trade and Cooperation Agreement between the European Union and the United Kingdom and had its own separate agreement signed in April 2026, which removed the physical barriers separating it from Spain but leaves the sovereignty claim unresolved.

Another remnant of the British colonial empire is Northern Ireland. London retained control of this territory when Ireland gained independence thanks to its Protestant population, which was the majority at the time. However, as the 2021 census shows, the Catholic population has recently surpassed the Protestant population for the first time (42 % and 31 % of the population, respectively). This new demographic reality soon found electoral expression, and since February 2024 Michelle O’Neill of Sinn Féin has served as First Minister, marking the first time in history that this Irish nationalist party has led the government. If we add to this the fact that the vote to remain in the European Union won in Northern Ireland with 56 % in the Brexit referendum, O’Neill’s assertion that Irish unification (and reentry into the European Union) could be achieved in 2030 seems increasingly plausible.

Similarly, we find the case of Scotland, one of the kingdoms that make up the United Kingdom, which has had a strong independence movement for years seeking to separate it from England. Although Scotland held an independence referendum in 2014 in which independence was rejected, this took place before the Brexit referendum. Ten years after Brexit, the United Kingdom’s prolonged political crisis has once again revived hopes of Scottish independence, and the Scottish National Party (SNP) is once again preparing for a referendum. An independent Scotland would mean the end of the United Kingdom as such (since the united kingdoms that give the country its name are precisely those of England and Scotland), and a possible Scottish reentry into the European Union could become yet another source of tension in an already complicated Anglo-European relationship.

Russia

On the European Union’s eastern flank lies the latest iteration of Russia, this time in the form of a federal republic, in a new cycle of its eternal geopolitical tragedy: the vulnerability of its current borders drives it to expand in pursuit of a more defensible position, but the more it expands, the more resentment and coalitions it generates against itself.

While there is nothing particularly novel about a Russia whose geopolitical aspirations exceed its capabilities, the conditions it faced in the first quarter of the 21st century were especially adverse. Today’s Russia, with fewer inhabitants than in 1910 and less territory than in 1750, has had to contend with a U.S. superpower, a united Europe, an established Japan, a rising China, and a prosperous Middle East. In other words, the global system put together by Washington to defeat Moscow in the 20th century continues to stand in the way of its geopolitical reconstruction. Put simply: Russia will not recover in this century the power it lost with the dissolution of the USSR in 1991.

However, unlike the Soviet Union, the Russian Federation does not have to play to win; it simply has to avoid losing. Because while Russia was the power most harmed by the Washington-led global order, it is also one of the geopolitical actors that would benefit most from its disintegration.

First, growing tensions between the European Union and the U.S. only give Moscow more room to maneuver. A European Union army replacing NATO would remain a major challenge, but a far easier rival to counter once Washington is taken out of the equation. Second, the regions that have benefited most from U.S.-led globalization are located, by design, along the edges of the Eurasian continent, surrounding Russia with prosperous and powerful rivals. A global U.S. naval withdrawal would unleash greater levels of chaos on all its flanks; chaos that would give the Kremlin a strategic window it has not had since the beginning of the Cold War. Finally, years of sanctions and international isolation have also transformed the Russian economy, limiting its growth but also making it less vulnerable to the fluctuations of international markets. As a result, in a more unstable world, Moscow could find renewed demand for exports of its vital resources, such as oil, gas, and minerals.

Argentina

This scenario of growing complexity on the international chessboard, occupied by an increasing number of ever more autonomous players, represents a historic opportunity for South America and Argentina. With our country far from the main flashpoints of global geopolitical conflict (South America is one of the planet’s most important zones of peace), Buenos Aires will have the opportunity to pursue a much more autonomous foreign policy, balancing the interests of various competing great powers. With no potential conflicts with neighboring countries, the possibilities for regional cooperation and integration open the door to building a solid and secure regional bloc.

The reconfiguration of the world system will probably pose a substantial challenge to the globalized economy and force it into a new phase of regionalized production. In this sense, the collapse of the U.S.-led international order could create incentives for the development and integration of the manufacturing base in South America, a region whose economic appeal will tend to increase as it remains a zone of peace removed from the major Eurasian conflicts.

Finally, by 2050, Argentina will also have an advantage that is not only geopolitical but biological: a relatively young population. As we will see in the next chapter, many of the world’s most advanced economies are heading toward population collapse in the coming decades, posing an existential threat to their future. Argentina’s relatively young population, its geopolitical security, and its capacity to welcome immigrants are three converging factors that will prove invaluable in the second half of the 21st century.