2050 inflection points for 2025

2025: we will soon be as far removed from 2000 as we are from 2050! What are the inflection points and future questions on humanity’s road to 2050? Full text of a NY essay that was published by the Itinera Institute.

The end of the new year 2025 will mark the end of the first quarter of the 21st century. We will be as far removed from the year 2000 as we are from the year 2050. 2000 feels like yesterday for those who around then, but how different the world has become! Our world is tilting from American hegemony and globalization to geopolitical conflict, protectionism, and mercantilism, from peace and cooperation to war and fragmentation, from rules and institutions to power and coalitions. Countries are tilting from democracy to autocracy or populism, or from autocracy to totalitarianism, and from multiculturalism to national identity or nationalism. What will be the trajectory towards the middle of the century?

Three scenarios are conceivable, broadly speaking. One: restauration, in which America and democratic countries recover sufficiently – economically, technologically, militarily – and innovate diplomatically to stabilize the international order with a new balance of power in which they no longer dominate but remain leading. Two: a Second Cold War, dividing the world into blocs and competing superpowers, where emerging medium-sized countries or geographically pivotal countries gain and exploit geopolitical importance. Three: chaos, plunging the world further into convulsion and instability, with tensions, conflicts and wars escalating until some cathartic event ushers in a new era.

Which of the three scenarios will prevail depends on the inflection points for the next twenty-five years. The future of China is such a fault line. China has become an economic superpower through Western globalization and domestic reconstruction. Both these drivers have peaked and seem destined to weaken further. China is looking for a new growth engine while struggling with overcapacity, debt overhangs and a population that is ageing and shrinking at the same time – the UN expects China’s population to halve by 2100. The first question for 2050: will China become a second Japan, a second US or a second Russia?

A second Japan remains economically important and regionally inescapable but does not become dominant, accepts international stability and prioritises managing its aging society for the sake of regime stability. A second US is an innovator and leader in important economic sectors, projects military power and has major scientific and cultural influence. A second Russia is a country that draws its status and national cohesion from conflict and war – read: the South-China Sea and Taiwan. China wants to become a second US but is running up against the limits of its existing political and economic model, its demography and the real US.

Russia itself is the second geopolitical inflection point for 2050, particularly from a European perspective. A country in steep economic and demographic decline – a fossil energy and war dependent economy the size of Italy and a population expected to decline by between 25% to 50% by the end of the century – seeks power through geography and aggression. Only a complete European victory in Ukraine could reverse this trend abruptly, triggering either a regime collapse akin to that of the former Soviet-Union or an all-out Russian implosion. Except in this unlikely hypothesis, we are in for at least a decade of cold and hybrid war in which both sides try to strengthen themselves while the final destination of Ukraine hangs in the balance. Thus the second question for 2050: will Russia become a second Canada, a second Iran or a second Turkey?

Particularly for a China seeking to become a second US, Russia could be what Canada is to the US: an economic link and a geopolitical lever. Russia would then become both a global vasal state and a regional power at the same time. These are both China’s and Russia’s current trajectories in the context of the Ukraine war. A second Iran is Russia as a feared rogue state exporting violence and conflict, while the country itself sinks into poverty, oppression and marginalization as the Putin regime morphs into an even darker successor. On the other hand, if a reformation were to come after Putin, the Russia of 2050 could resemble Erdoğan's Turkey: a bridge country rediscovering its historical role between the West and the East while still leaning towards democracy and the Western order.

We, in Europe and America, will help shape and settle these geopolitical fault lines ourselves, through our own actions and inactions. A restauration scenario for world order requires strong Western economies and democracies, and coalitions with third countries for new international cooperation culminating in an upgrade of the international institutions of the post WWII global order: the UN, the IMF, the World Bank, and so on. America's path will be decisive in this. Hence, the third question for 2050: will ‘America First’ mean America alone, can Europe form a great power duo with the US, or will new era of globalisation emerge? 

America alone is a strong America without strong allies or alliances, while power blocs proliferate and conflicts are mostly settled through realpolitik and transactional opportunism. Call it Trump’s America, which begs the question whether we are entering Trump’s era or whether a post-Trump US will rediscover the value of global commitments. If European countries further develop the European Union into a more federal superpower that can project hard power and exercise geopolitics, Europe could become an American partner for peace and freedom both regionally and globally. Finally, a new era of globalisation would be a phase of new international economic integration building on pro-Western values ​​and interests redefined for a new world order – incorporating such challenges as climate change, energy infrastructure and supply chains, AI, cybersecurity, space, trade routes, and the like.

Western success in the world requires success at home. As we move towards mid-century we must prove that, contrary to what anti-Western forces currently propagate, decline is not our predestination. Economic growth, the creation of new prosperity and productivity, is the crucial factor. More prosperity is the basis on which territorial security, democratic trust, political stability, social cohesion and win-win relationships between countries can be built. Without a new growth dynamism, the ageing Western world faces destabilising choices between these new priorities and its old welfare state. The era of neoliberalism and win-win free trade is over, a still chaotic new era of state activism has begun. Can Western countries reinvent themselves as entrepreneurial and investment states that enable and drive forward market capitalism without lapsing into Chinese-style state capitalism and zero-sum mercantilism? That is the key economic policy question for the coming years.

The future of technology and technology policy will likely be decisive in this regard. We live in the age of technology. Everything is technology and, with global chaos all around us, almost all technology has become a matter of security or defence to some degree. Autonomous AI weapons, the return of a nuclear arms race and the rise of space as a theatre of war: these form the Bermuda Triangle for 2050. Will we evolve towards a surveillance state, a de facto oligopoly of technology companies intertwined with governments, or even government-driven? Or will we find a way to have a military-industrial-technological complex function in parallel with a flourishing technology market? Will it be techno-optimism that liberates citizens and consumers, serves people and upgrades humanity for longer, better and smarter lives? Or will it be a techno-dystopia of control, weapons, and hedonism? The second presidency of Donald Trump will be a first test case.

If a second Cold War is indeed looming, there will be three major differences with the first. First, China is much stronger and more important economically, even for our own economies in the West, than the Soviet Union was in times past. The next few years, particularly under the second Trump administration, will probably determine whether democratic countries will push themselves towards degrees of decoupling from China, also in Europe. Second, the former ‘Third World’ of non-aligned countries is now a much more dynamic group of emerging medium powers that will not easily split between ‘us’ and ‘them’ and that want their place in the sun – just look at how the BRICS are currently evolving into an alternative geopolitical platform. We in the West might think in terms of a new cold war, but many non-western countries beg to think differently and believe they have countervailing agency.

Third and foremost, Western societies themselves are demographically, sociologically and culturally much weaker and more divided than in the second half of the 20th century. Our ailments are both manifold and profound. The combination of an ageing population with historic immigration levels and hyper-diversity, the challenge of integration and assimilation on an unprecedented scale. The chasms of inequality, alienation and atomisation, with the excesses of mental illness, addiction and wasted lives. The loss of authority of, and trust in democratic institutions and elites. The polarisation, the relativisation of knowledge, and the fragmentation of reality in multiple digital ‘post-truths’. The defeatist resignation of pessimism, doom-mongering, negativism, even cultural self-loathing. None of this suggests the building blocks for a long, hard and sustained struggle for global leadership. The renaissance of the democratic West as a role model therefore requires, perhaps above all, a societal renaissance. A time of war and conflict is the time in which democratic societies can tap into dormant pools of energy and strength, can deepen and renew themselves, can find new purpose and spirit, provided they are blessed with inspiring leadership.

If the past quarter century has reminded us of anything, it is of Niels Bohr’s admonition that ‘prediction is very difficult, especially if it is about the future’. The most significant terrorist attack ever on American soil, the worst tsunami in recorded history, the worst financial crisis since the Great Crash of 1929, the first pandemic in over a century, a cascade of invasion, civil war, terrorism and war in the Middle East, the largest refugee crisis and the first war of invasion in Europe since World War II: all shattering global events that hardly anyone saw coming. When we consider how much the world has endured in such a short time, it is nothing short of a miracle that the wheels of state and politics have not completely fallen off.

The decade leading up to the 21st century was extremely stable and calm, fostering geopolitical naivety, policy complacency and a culture of entitlement. The near-quarter-century since has been the opposite, generating fear, uncertainty and anger. The unexpected or unpredictable is not going away and could unite or divide all of humanity. Perhaps another man-made attack will prove cataclysmic in the near future. Perhaps a climate catastrophe, an even worse pandemic, the breakthrough of artificial general intelligence or the discovery of the universe will prove to be the real tipping point towards 2050.

January 2025