GeoBrief: My Intake #1

The World feels like it is falling apart. We all sense it as we are moving from one crisis to another. The mix includes wars, inflation, climate shocks, and political division. It seems like the world is slipping out of control as the old order is collapsing. Unfortunately, this is not just a feeling or just a perception. What we are all witnessing is a deep strategic upturn of global order.

Make no mistake, this is not the repetition of the Cold War, East against West. Our world is far more complicated and interconnected. This is the era of polycrisis, where conflicts, economics, and technology collide in ways that create chaos and uncertainty.

The Polycrisis Reality

If you look in daily news, you will see that the war in Ukraine reshaping the EU and NATO. In Gaza the humanitarian disaster continues while regional powers reposition themselves. In the Red Sea, shipping routes are constantly threatened and thus global economy. In the East, at the South China Sea, the tensions between the two superpowers pose a significant threat to regional and global peace and security. In the Caribbean, tensions rising between the U.S. and Venezuela, a key ally of Russia and China.

Those are just some of the crises which are interconnected causing troubles in global stability and growth. Refugee flows from MENA region or Latin America fuel far right and anti-immigrant policies, energy markets spike due to attacks in the Red Sea and elsewhere. Tech decoupling between Washington and Beijing divides economies, regions and even systems. Catastrophes due to climate change and the demographic collapse add more complexity to the fragile international system.