A year is drawing to a close at the edge of the sixty centuries that separate us from the dawn of human history. A blink of an eye, if ever there was one, on which a retrospective view remains essential in order to discern the overall trends and look ahead.
The last four years have been marked by the COVID-19 pandemic and the acceleration of previous geopolitical trends. The strengthening of Sino-American bipolarity has outlined the contours of a Cold War 2.0, in which the decline of the West and the offensive protagonism of China and the BRICS countries appear to be two main dynamics. A new architecture of predation has taken shape on a global scale, one of the cogs of which has been the colossal transfer of wealth that took place during the pandemic and the tightening of techno-feudal governance. At the same time, structural reconfigurations have continued in Latin America, Africa, Asia, and Europe.
The year 2025 marked a turning point in this cycle of destabilization and in the ongoing rearrangements. The Russian-Ukrainian war, a veritable immaterial trap of the 21st century, remains with no prospect of de-escalation and is fueling an extension of the conflict under the existential threat brandished by both sides. It echoes Israel’s maneuvers in the Middle East (the Twelve-Day War), as well as those in Yemen, Taiwan, Chinese Turkestan, and Panama (the bi-oceanic canal), in the sense that it involves forcibly embedding, through manufactured conflict and violence, into the infrastructure of the New Silk Road, a project driven by both China and Western industry (transfer of approximately $7.5 trillion since 2013).
In Africa, the Alliance of Sahel States has continued to challenge the Euro-Atlantic area and is putting pressure on other West African powers. In Latin America, the strategy of tension fomented between the two forms of socialist and libertarian statism has been reinforced, while the North American power has staged its fight against the narco-states that it has been secretly supporting since 19481.
At the same time, a crisis in the monetary system has clearly begun. Global money printing, government debt, and the trade war waged by the United States have led to the devaluation of the dollar, the yen, and other national currencies, while gold and silver have been used to massively stockpile the assets of multiple central banks, led by China and Russia. This has led to a global de-dollarization, against a backdrop of self-sabotage by the United States and a partial challenge to the international order by pro-multipolar nations. From this perspective, 2026 brings together the conditions for a large-scale monetary explosion, which will likely seal the fate of the economic architecture that has been taking shape in recent years (UN 2.0, banking reform designed by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), digital currencies, supranational governance mechanisms).
In light of these developments, it is important to emphasize that conventional approaches to power relations, as well as simplistic views that see the current situation as merely a new division of a now post-Western world, prevent us from fully understanding this reality. Anachronism and disconnect are the norm, reminding us that the immaterial realm of perceptions, information, and knowledge is the cornerstone for action on the international stage. Despite the obvious signs of a new East-West polarization and multipolar fragmentation generated by the neo-nationalist momentum, the world continues to be driven primarily by imperial and transnational forces. This geometry took shape at the end of the 18th century, through a conflict that expanded horizontally, with the addition of new areas of confrontation, and vertically, with the juxtaposition of new visible and invisible arenas. These invisible modes of combat have been present throughout history and date back long before Sun Tzu and Thucydides, to the time of the Babylonian Empire (1890 BC), whose strategic culture was taken up by the Roman and Byzantine dynasties2, then by the European empires.
As such, the quarter-century that is coming to an end at the beginning of the third millennium continues the dynamics that began during the previous thirty centuries. On the one hand, understanding of the great contemporary strategic game remains compartmentalized and out of step with reality, and this is true for all schools of geopolitical thought. This disconnect reflects a real containment in terms of the relationship to reality (post-realism), insofar as societies are no longer able to perceive the entirety of the strategic environment in which they operate. On the other hand, the center of gravity driving the transformations mentioned above is not located at the level of nation-states, but at the level of a powerful and organized transnational stratum, still poorly named, predatory of economies and nation-states, and heir to the cultures of combat practiced in the past. This double helix, driven over the long term, is now leading to a new global system of predation, reaching maturity with the advance of the third industrial revolution. This design is not far from constituting the most sophisticated architecture of domination in history.
Dunia is one of the light and independent players likely to take a more lucid stance on these issues. The disruptive nature of the agenda requires, on the one hand, a radical renewal of modes of observation and strategic thinking, straddling the immaterial, geostrategic, and geoeconomic dimensions. On the other hand, it is becoming imperative to further link innovative knowledge, the pioneers of this conflictual matrix, and initiatives related to these issues between different geocultural areas (English-speaking, Spanish-speaking, and French-speaking).
Dunia’s project remains to equip collective action in the field of information and strategic intelligence in the service of corporate growth. The current situation encourages us to turn more firmly towards the fight against systemic predation and to prepare for the cycle of conflict that is beginning.
Here’s to an excellent end to 2025 and let’s hold on tight for 2026!
