Welcome to this week’s edition of Geopolitics & the Day After. Each week, we curate and synthesize key developments from global politics, economics, and financial markets, drawing from a wide range of trusted sources. Our goal is to provide you with a clear, concise, and insightful overview of the forces transforming the world today and shaping tomorrow. Below is an overview of what we cover this week:
Geopolitical Concerns takes a look at the risks of the U.S. falling behind a rapidly evolving Eurasian power bloc—led by Russia and China—amid its fragmented global strategy, supply chain vulnerabilities, and overstretched military posture, which challenge its ability to shape the emerging multipolar world order.
Geoeconomics assesses the deepening U.S. fiscal crisis driven by political gridlock, rising debt, and economic complacency, while China’s push to de-dollarize and Europe’s economic stagnation expose growing vulnerabilities in the global financial system.
Global Junctions dives into the global race for technological dominance as it becomes increasingly defined not just by innovation but by the ability to secure supply chains, navigate regulatory complexity, and cultivate human capital.
Global Trajectories reviews the collapse of global governance and multilateral cooperation—from trade and food security to health and postwar reconstruction—that is fueling a fragmented world order where national interests increasingly override collective solutions, deepening inequality and institutional dysfunction.
In a special AI section this week, we discuss Amazon’s aggressive automation strategy, emblematic of a broader global shift, which is rapidly redefining work by integrating AI across both blue- and white-collar roles, raising productivity while intensifying concerns over job displacement, inequality, and the urgent need for new labor protections and training system
Geopolitical Concerns
The New Eurasian Order: America Must Link Its Atlantic and Pacific Strategies
Julianne Smith and Lindsey Ford, Foreign Affairs
The US Shouldn’t Need Another Warning on Rare Earths
Bloomberg
U.S. Carrier to the Caribbean: A Step Closer to War
Mark F. Cancian and Chris H. Park, CSIS
As Putin Digs In, a Long—and Different—War With Ukraine Looms
Yaroslav Trofimov, Wall Street Journal
As geopolitical fault lines across Eurasia deepen, U.S. strategy risks lagging behind a new transcontinental order taking shape among its adversaries. China and Russia’s military and technological alignment, bolstered by partners such as Iran and North Korea, has blurred the boundaries between the European and Indo-Pacific theaters, forming a de facto Eurasian bloc capable of sustaining long conflicts. Yet Washington has begun discouraging its allies from cross-regional coordination, urging Europeans to focus on Russia and Asians on China. This retreat from a transregional approach leaves U.S. partners to fill the void through independent cooperation, even as new institutions like BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization provide rival powers with platforms to erode Western influence. Compounding this strategic drift, Beijing’s rare earth export restrictions have exposed U.S. vulnerabilities in critical supply chains vital to defense and energy technologies. While a temporary reprieve was reached, the episode revealed the urgent need for Washington to diversify supply networks with allies such as Australia and Brazil to prevent China from weaponizing economic dependencies.
Simultaneously, Washington’s redeployment of the USS Gerald R. Ford carrier strike group to the Caribbean highlights the strain of maintaining global reach amid multiple, overlapping crises. The move, framed as a counter-narcotics mission, signals a broader militarization of the Western Hemisphere that diverts scarce assets from flashpoints in Europe and Asia. In Ukraine, Russia’s rejection of cease-fire proposals and the collapse of peace efforts suggest a prolonged war of attrition defined by economic exhaustion and drone warfare. Ukraine’s deep strikes on Russia’s oil and gas infrastructure have begun to test the sustainability of Moscow’s war economy, even as Putin remains unwilling to compromise for fear of appearing weak. With both adversaries and allies realigning, the United States faces growing challenges in sustaining a coherent global posture. Its ability to adapt will determine whether it can still shape, rather than merely endure, the emerging multipolar order.
Geoeconomics
Congress Owns This Debt Crisis
Kevin D. Williamson, The Dispatch
Overseas renminbi lending surges as China steps up campaign to de-dollarise
William Sandlund and Haohsiang Ko, Financial Times
The German Economic Miracle, Then and Now by Barry Eichengreen
Barry Eichengreen, Project Syndicate
AI Bubble? The Real Danger Is Tight Credit Spreads
Allison Schager, Bloomberg
The United States is heading toward a worsening fiscal crisis as political paralysis in Congress accelerates debt accumulation and undermines confidence in U.S. financial management. A trillion dollars in new debt in just two months shows the structural deficit and lack of political will to address it through either higher taxes or spending cuts. Despite Republican control of all branches of government, fiscal discipline has eroded, and tariff revenues touted as a fix have provided only marginal relief while burdening consumers and distorting trade. The result is a dangerous complacency toward soaring deficits, driven by populist leadership that conflates political loyalty with economic stewardship. Meanwhile, abroad, China is deepening its long-term campaign to de-dollarize global finance by expanding renminbi-denominated lending and trade. Its overseas credit, deposits, and bonds have quadrupled over five years, aided by swap lines, offshore clearing banks, and a growing cross-border payment infrastructure outside the dollar system. Through these moves, Beijing seeks not to replace but to dilute the dollar’s dominance, insulating itself and its partners from Western sanctions and weaponized finance.
In Europe, Germany’s once-admired economic model is showing strain, as decades of export-led growth and industrial strength give way to stagnation, populist backlash, and declining competitiveness against China. The country’s postwar “economic miracle,” underpinned by the Marshall Plan and the 1953 London Debt Agreement, transformed Germany into Europe’s powerhouse, but those same foundations, namely fiscal prudence, manufacturing exports, and social consensus, now appear insufficient for a shifting global economy. Across markets, similar complacency prevails: narrow credit spreads despite rising bankruptcy risks signal that investors may be dangerously underpricing risk. Elevated debt levels, higher refinancing costs, and the surge of private credit are creating latent vulnerabilities in the financial system that could trigger future crises.
Global Junctions
The Supply Chain Chokepoints in Quantum
Prineha Narang and Joshua Levine, War on the Rocks
Europe’s Tech Strategy: Regulate the Leaders, Then Blame the Lag
Mark Jamison, American Enterprise Institute
OpenAI shunned advisers on $1.5tn of deals
Tabby Kinder and George Hammond, Financial Times
A Guide to Collaborating With AI in the Military Classroom
Matthew Woessner, War on the Rocks
The race to dominate frontier technologies is accelerating, but the glide path toward that future is already showing structural cracks. U.S. quantum ambitions hinge not on theoretical breakthroughs but on fragile supply chains – helium-3 scarcity, foreign-controlled rare earth processing, and single-point dependencies like dilution refrigerators that could halt progress in months if disrupted. Meanwhile, Europe is trying to assert digital sovereignty through enforcement instead of innovation, tightening regulations on Meta and TikTok even as contradictory laws like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the Digital Services Act (DSA) push companies into a compliance paradox. Across the Atlantic, Washington is doubling down on tech-enabled advantage: OpenAI’s staggering, trust-driven chip supply deals have tied industrial giants’ market value to future computing capacity at a scale that looks visionary to some and dangerously overleveraged to others. These developments signal an era where strategic leverage is built not only from who invents technology, but who can build, protect, and deploy it at scale without regulatory or supply-chain paralysis.
That makes human capital the wildcard. As AI becomes embedded in national defense, professional military education is confronting a dilemma: fully embrace AI and risk hollowing out the independent judgment future officers need, or restrict it and fall behind rivals who train for AI-enabled command. Scholars warn that students must learn how AI reasons – including its biases, programmed guardrails, and potential for manipulation – before it becomes the default decision-maker in crises. From semiconductor fabs to PME classrooms, the United States is entering a strategic test: can it harness exponential technologies while still producing leaders capable of questioning the machine? The tension between scale and safeguards will define whether these breakthroughs strengthen American power or expose new vulnerabilities faster than policymakers can adapt.
Global Trajectories
Tariffs, deals and multilateral ideals: can the World Trade Organization survive?
Petros C. Mavroidis, Bruegel
Siena Cicarelli, Australian Institute of International Affairs
Needed: Blueprint for a U.S. Health System Overhaul
Mahshid Abir, Megan Andrew, Kelly Klima, Leslie Adrienne Payne, Nahom M. Beyene and Han-Yi Chiu, RAND
Sara Roy, The New York Review of Books
The unraveling of global governance mechanisms has placed multilateralism under severe strain, with the World Trade Organization (WTO) facing its deepest existential crisis since its founding. The Trump administration’s imposition of unilateral tariffs and selective trade deals has sidelined the WTO’s most-favored-nation principle and paralyzed its dispute-settlement system, already weakened by years of political stalemate. As geopolitical tensions intensify and major powers pursue protectionist or bilateral trade arrangements, the WTO’s relevance is fading, leaving global trade increasingly fragmented. This institutional erosion extends beyond commerce: at the 2025 World Food Forum, global leaders pledged record investments toward food security and sustainable agriculture, yet such commitments are undercut by the same fractured multilateral environment. The redirection of development funding toward defense, the dismantling of U.S. foreign aid infrastructure, and competing donor agendas from China, the UAE, and Brazil show how even shared priorities like food security are now filtered through national strategic interests rather than global solidarity.
The retreat from cooperative global problem-solving is mirrored at the domestic level in the United States, where the health system faces deep structural failure reminiscent of the broader dysfunction of international institutions. Longstanding challenges of access, cost, and resilience exposed by the pandemic have prompted calls for a complete redesign emphasizing decentralized, technology-enabled, community-based care. The health sector’s inability to adapt to demographic, environmental, and workforce pressures parallels the stagnation of governance reform worldwide. In the Middle East, the debate over Gaza’s reconstruction following the October cease-fire reveals how “multilateral” initiatives risk reproducing domination rather than empowerment. Competing postwar blueprints envision governance models that exclude Palestinian agency while embedding economic and political control in Western and Israeli hands. Across these arenas, from trade to health to postwar reconstruction, the same tension persists: technology, capital, and policy frameworks are being retooled not for shared governance, but for managing inequality within an increasingly fragmented world order.
Special AI Section
Amazon Plans to Replace More Than Half a Million Jobs With Robots
Karen Weise, The New York Times
Is Amazon’s massive wave of layoffs the first of the AI era?
Nicolas Chapuis, Lemonde
AI Will Transform the Global Economy. Let’s Make Sure It Benefits Humanity.
Kristalina Georgieva, International Monetary Fund
The Projected Impact of Generative AI on Future Productivity Growth
University of Pennsylvania
Simon Book, Patrick Beuth, Angela Gruber, Max Hoppenstedt, Marcel Rosenbach and Martin Schlak, Spiegel International
Amazon’s sweeping automation strategy encapsulates the scale and pace of the coming transformation of work. Internal company documents reveal plans to automate up to 75 percent of operations by 2033, potentially displacing over half a million jobs and reducing the need for future hiring by 600,000. The transition is being framed by executives as a shift toward more technical and better-paid roles, though critics note the profound implications for blue-collar communities. The company’s parallel decision to cut 14,000 corporate jobs shows how automation and generative AI are converging to restructure not just manual but also white-collar labor. Amazon’s approach reflects a broader corporate recalibration toward efficiency and cost control, positioning AI as a structural tool for long-term profitability rather than a short-term experiment. This dynamic mirrors a wider industrial movement: as companies integrate AI into logistics, human resources, and customer service, traditional employment models are being rewritten at an accelerating rate.
Globally, the economic consequences of artificial intelligence are beginning to take shape. IMF research estimates that nearly 40 percent of jobs worldwide, and up to 60 percent in advanced economies, are highly exposed to AI-driven automation, posing both opportunities for productivity gains and risks of deepening inequality. Analysis of generative AI’s projected impact suggests a modest yet lasting lift in productivity growth, with the potential to permanently raise global output by 3-4 percent over the long term, though benefits will accrue unevenly across sectors and skill levels. In practice, the pace of transformation is fastest in firms like Amazon and Stripe, where AI agents already execute complex tasks autonomously, but its social and economic implications remain contested. While tech leaders hail an efficiency revolution, skeptics warn of job polarization and eroding worker protections. The emerging consensus, however, is that AI will not simply replace human labor but redefine it by compressing routine work, elevating creative and analytical tasks, and demanding new systems of training, safety nets, and ethical governance to ensure that technological progress translates into shared prosperity rather than structural exclusion.
