UK View Of Dangerous Global Strategic Trends

New
emerging nations
poised to take on the mantle of the”world's factory,” however, mean overall patterns of global trade could
change significantly
by mid-century as new routes and
ports
open in the coming decades. A diversification of supply chains due to increasing geopolitical tensions could alter these configurations further.

Demands for commodities could also increasingly drive competition into the shared spaces. Significant deposits of critical minerals and
hydrocarbons
under the poles and across the
ocean floors
could see new races to mine these fragile ecosystems emerge, placing increasing strain on the international treaties that protect them.

Global food demand is also expected to increase by
50% by 2055, creating increasing pressures for land farming and on the seas, including through
illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing.

Meanwhile, the race for high-tech leadership and control of digital standards and protocols is already growing, particularly given the dual-military potential of many of these technologies.

The expansion of digital communications and services also poses new potential risks. Artificial intelligence, for example, could prove both the
great disruptor
of traditional work while creating new forms of employment, with significant implications for economic and social stability.

Digital infrastructure is also proliferating around the world. More satellites were
launched in the first six months of 2022 than during the previous 60 years, for example, largely by commercial actors.

Subsea cable networks, already carrying
95%
of global internet traffic, continue to expand particularly
in the southern hemisphere. These crucial networks will be increasingly important to how the world functions, but also ever more vulnerable to accidents, as well as cyber and physical attack.

Cutting across these drivers will be the more frequent, violent and permanent impacts of climate change. This coincides with growing populations increasingly
moving to coastal urban areas, the very regions most likely to be impacted by rising seas and more damaging storms. In addition, impacts to
critical national infrastructure
could become more prevalent and damaging.

Meanwhile as ice melt opens up the
possibility of new trading lanes
across the Arctic, traditional routes such as the Panama Canal are already being
impacted
by changing temperatures.

Drought and storms could see
millions becoming climate refugees
in the coming decades, while the viability of some coastal regions and small island states may increasingly be challenged. More recently scientists have warned that some climate tipping points could be
reached by mid-century, which could change weather patterns dramatically.

Near universal ownership of portable electronic devices combined with ubiquitous internet access will make the world
increasingly connected
but also more aware of rising inequality. While in the coming decades humankind will push further into space, the depths of the oceans and the mysteries of life, the benefits of these breakthroughs are unlikely to be available to all.

During the pandemic, for example, the world witnessed
reversals
in the indices of human betterment that had hitherto risen for decades. During that same period, however,
131 global billionaires doubled their wealth. As a result, the state and the current systems of economic management and governance are increasingly being questioned in some regions.

Combined, these pressures mean the future of geopolitics and security looks increasingly uncertain. While the US, China, and Russia and other major powers in Europe and East Asia seem likely to remain significant actors, the global balance of power is set to become more congested and contested in the coming decades. That could see rising medium and small powers taking a more prominent role in global affairs in the future.

Pressures on states, however, could also create gaps in governance for other actors to exploit. That includes violent extremism of all types, as well as transnational criminal gangs. With digital, space and other technologies playing an ever more prominent role in how states function, the corporations and the elites that own these assets could also become more powerful global actors.

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At the same time the future trajectory of any power is looking increasingly uncertain. Previous assumptions that China will become the world's No. 1 economy, for example, now look less certain. Russia's fortunes hang on the outcome of its illegal war in Ukraine, as well as the price China might extract for continued support. The US may face an increasing array of international demands, even if it avoids a turn back to isolationism. All of which has more than a“rhyme” of history about it.

But if global order is less certain than at any time
since the end of the Cold War, what are the alternatives? GST7 offers five scenarios. Their purpose is to avoid developing strategies based only on a preferred future, often a common approach, but instead to be ready for less palatable world orders as well as the types of actions that might avoid them.

The first scenario is that some future existential crisis sees the world turn again to multilateral solutions. It is the type of world the UN Secretary General has called for during his
Summit for the Futures.

Alternatively, the current rules-based international order endures, albeit increasingly competed.

Yet growing rivalry could also see the world divided into competing“spheres of influence” in which major global powers dictate the terms of trade, diplomacy and security to states in their orbit. Not quite another Cold War given the interconnections of trade and other issues, such a world might more resemble the systems of global governance dominating the 19th
and early 20th
centuries.

That arrangement could, of course, lead to yet more devastating wars, and edition seven is the first GST to consider the possibility of another conflict at a global scale. Alternatively, a succession of crises could place states under increasing pressure, with other actors then taking a more prominent role in global affairs.

As the new UK government prepares to deliver the outcome of its Strategic Defense Review next year, it will need to account for all these possible futures. With the clock counting down on potential new crises atop ongoing wars in the Euro-Atlantic and Middle East, it may not have long to act to shape a future beneficial to all.

Peter Olive
(...) is a Pacific Forum senior adjunct fellow and former Royal Navy officer and senior defense leader. Peter led the UK's Global Strategic Trends program until July 2024.

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