Geopolitical Concerns reviews the shift from a cycle of rising powers to an era of shared stagnation and decline, where aging nations face internal challenges and external volatility, leading to defensive posturing, strategic rivalries, and a focus on maintaining influence rather than expanding it.
Geoeconomics dives into the fragility of the global financial system as excessive U.S.-driven liquidity, inflated asset bubbles, and overreliance on American markets create systemic vulnerabilities that could trigger a worldwide contraction if investor confidence falters or policy missteps occur.
Global Junctions takes a look at the world’s leading tech powers as they enter a new era of industrial competition driven by AI and quantum breakthroughs, where massive investments, geopolitical stakes, and ethical uncertainties are reshaping global power structures.
Global Trajectories explores how China’s state-driven industrial strategy is transforming global energy and resource dynamics through dominance in critical minerals and massive infrastructure projects, while the U.S. and its allies struggle to balance supply chain security, sustainability, and economic resilience.
Geopolitical Concerns
Michael Beckley, Foreign Affairs
Michael Kimmage, Foreign Policy
What will change under Japan’s new coalition? 4 things to know
Tsubasa Suruga, Asia Nikkei
The America v China spat reveals a dangerous dynamic
The Economist
Global geopolitics is entering an era of stagnation rather than ascent. The centuries-long cycle of rising and falling powers has given way to a world of aging incumbents facing shared decline. Industrial dynamism and demographic growth, which are the engines of past transformations, are faltering, leaving few capable challengers to the United States, which now leads by virtue of endurance rather than expansion. China’s deceleration, India’s human-capital constraints, and Europe’s demographic and fiscal fatigue mark the end of the “rising power” age. Yet stagnation breeds its own volatility: frustrated states are turning outward to mask decline. Russia’s confrontation with Europe exemplifies this shift. Its incursions and hybrid operations are less a new form of war than the desperate militarization of a faltering power. As Moscow’s influence erodes, its conflict with Ukraine has evolved into a continental contest, binding Europe directly to the front. The EU’s economic and strategic depth ensures long-term resilience, but the line between indirect involvement and direct confrontation is blurring fast.
This global drift toward stagnation is mirrored in Asia’s shifting alliances and rising tensions. In Japan, the new LDP-Japan Innovation coalition under Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi signals a rightward turn, blending assertive defense policy and fiscal restraint with stricter immigration controls. This alliance seeks to stabilize Japanese politics after years of stagnation, yet it also reflects a regional mood of defensive consolidation amid a shifting security order. Meanwhile, U.S.-China relations are again sliding toward confrontation. Beijing’s new export controls on batteries and rare earths and Washington’s threats of triple-digit tariffs reveal the deepening weaponization of supply chains. While both sides hope to avoid a full-blown trade war, the logic of “mutually assured disruption” now defines their relationship as each seeks to loosen the other’s grip on strategic materials and technology, only to provoke further escalation. In this increasingly brittle landscape, the contest for influence is no longer about expansion but about control, managing decline, protecting leverage, and enduring the economic costs of rivalry.
Geoeconomics
Gita Gopinath on the crash that could torch $35trn of wealth
Economist
The world economy in an age of disorder
Martin Wolf, Financial Times
Why gold and stocks are partying together
Ruchir Sharma, Financial Times
The Coming US Financial Crisis
Şebnem Kalemli-Özcan, Dambisa Moyo, Hilary J. Allen, Mohamed A. El-Erian, Simon Johnson and Corey Klemmer, Project Syndicate
Geoeconomics Is Transforming Foreign Policy
Dr. Teesta Prakash, Australian Institute of International Affairs
Global markets are balancing on a knife’s edge as the world economy grows increasingly dependent on American financial dominance and investor complacency. Gita Gopinath warns that a correction of U.S. equity markets could erase over $35 trillion in global wealth, exposing the fragile concentration of growth and returns in a single economy. With high household exposure to equities, weakening consumption, and limited policy space, even a moderate crash could trigger worldwide contraction. The dollar’s weakening safe-haven role and questions over the Federal Reserve’s independence amplify these risks. Meanwhile, the global economy continues to navigate an “age of disorder,” as the IMF describes a world shaped by U.S. retreat from global leadership, trade wars, and technological upheaval. Despite resilient growth and adaptive private sectors, rising fiscal deficits, protectionism, and escalating U.S.-China tensions threaten to upend fragile stability. For poorer nations, cuts in aid and concessional finance, including the closure of USAID, could deepen inequality and slow recovery, leaving the global system simultaneously overstretched and underprepared for future shocks.
At the same time, the global financial system is inflating multiple bubbles on an unprecedented tide of liquidity. Gold and equities now rise in tandem, a distortion driven not by fundamentals but by excess cash, speculative confidence, and faith in state support. The U.S. deficit-fueled liquidity surge and AI-driven exuberance have created conditions in which risk-taking appears endlessly rewarded. Yet beneath this euphoria lies systemic fragility. Retail speculation, leveraged hedge funds, and relaxed capital requirements are eroding the foundations of financial stability, while warnings mount that an AI bubble or policy misstep could ignite a broader crisis. As investors “whistle past the graveyard,” trust in U.S. institutions remains the thin line separating momentum from meltdown. Beyond America, the fusion of economics and geopolitics is redefining power itself: tariffs and trade now serve as instruments of coercion, from Washington’s 100% tariffs on China to India’s recalibration between the West and its own strategic autonomy. Geoeconomics has replaced diplomacy as the primary language of power, shaping a world where national interests are measured not by borders or ideology, but by markets, capital flows, and the fragile confidence that still sustains them.
Global Junctions
How Sam Altman Tied Tech’s Biggest Players to OpenAI
Berber Jin, Wall Street Journal
Your New Teammate Is a Machine. Are You Ready?
Nelson Lim, RAND
America’s Quantum Manufacturing Moment
Prineha Narang and Joshua Levine, War on the Rocks
Claude enters the lab: Anthropic bets big on life sciences
Melissa Heikkilä and Hannah Kuchler, Financial Times
The world’s major technology powers are entering an era of unrestrained acceleration, where ambition and infrastructure are merging into a new form of industrial competition. Sam Altman’s multi-trillion-dollar vision for OpenAI has drawn in chipmakers, cloud providers, and investors from Tokyo to Texas, transforming one company’s appetite for computing power into a global financial phenomenon. The frenzy underscores how artificial intelligence has evolved from a tool of innovation into a geopolitical and economic dependency – one capable of distorting markets and reshaping industrial priorities. Yet beneath the optimism lies a structural weakness: as AI systems begin to act with greater autonomy, societies are struggling to define accountability. Automation bias, legal ambiguity, and the absence of enforceable ethical standards risk creating a vacuum of responsibility just as AI moves deeper into the core functions of economies and governments.
At the same time, a new technological frontier is forming around quantum science, where breakthroughs in navigation, materials, and molecular simulation hint at a coming reordering of industrial and military power. The United States and its allies are racing to secure control over this next-generation supply chain, treating quantum infrastructure much like nuclear or semiconductor assets – a strategic resource tied to national resilience. Meanwhile, companies such as Anthropic are pushing AI further into the life sciences, integrating large models into biomedical research and drug development, promising extraordinary efficiency but demanding new regulatory and ethical guardrails. Together, these developments reveal a world in transition: where data, energy, and intelligence have become the raw materials of power, and where the contest to harness them is redefining not only markets but the balance of global governance itself.
Global Trajectories
How China Took Over the World’s Rare-Earths Industry
Jon Emont, Wall Street Journal
Will world’s largest dam project be big enough for China’s economy?
Cissy Zhou, Nikkei Asia
Shifting Power: The Next Phase of U.S. Foreign Assistance
Hadeil Ali and Andrew Friedman, Center for Strategic and International Studies
Rare-earth ‘de-risking’ from China will be dirty and costly
Ken Moriyasu, Nikkei Asia
China’s industrial strategy is reshaping the global balance of resources and energy. Its decades-long consolidation of the rare-earths sector has yielded near-total dominance over critical minerals that underpin clean energy, defense, and high-tech manufacturing. Despite U.S. efforts to revive domestic production, Beijing’s control of processing and pricing remains overwhelming, with its latest export restrictions further weaponizing supply chains. The state’s long-term, centralized, and economically coercive approach contrasts sharply with the fragmented, market-driven U.S. model. At the same time, Beijing is betting on massive infrastructure to stimulate its slowing economy. The 1.2 trillion yuan Yarlung Tsangpo hydropower project, billed as the “project of the century,” symbolizes both ambition and anxiety: an attempt to reignite growth and assert green leadership even as China’s traditional playbook of state-led investment shows diminishing returns. While it promises to bolster power security and national pride, economists question whether such megaprojects can meaningfully revive domestic demand or offset structural stagnation in real estate, consumption, and productivity.
Beyond China, the architecture of global development and energy strategy is entering a profound transition. The dismantling of USAID and the retrenchment of Western aid have forced emerging economies to rethink foreign assistance models around self-reliance, localization, and equity. This shift could spur leaner, more resilient systems, but also leave critical gaps as local organizations struggle to fill shrinking funding pipelines. Meanwhile, efforts by the U.S. and its allies to “de-risk” supply chains from China expose the trade-offs of strategic diversification: cleaner politics, but dirtier production. Replicating China’s scale of rare-earth refining would be prohibitively expensive and environmentally fraught, suggesting that complete decoupling may be illusory. Analysts instead call for pragmatic adaptation, leveraging U.S. energy abundance in fossil fuels and technology to offset mineral dependence while forging selective partnerships with resource-rich states. As artificial intelligence drives a new surge in global energy demand, the coming decade will test whether advanced economies can balance security, sustainability, and speed or whether, in pursuing de-risking, they merely shift vulnerabilities from one dependency to another.
