The Geopolitics of 2069 Are More Chaotic Than You Can Imagine
If you think 2019 is going to be chaotic, just wait for 2069
People say we’re about to enter the “Asian century.” That would be true if the world still did centuries. But it doesn’t; change driven by technological advancements now comes so rapidly and with such force that it’s challenging to know what the next year of geopolitics will look like, let alone the next 50.
That said, we are undeniably embarking on an “Asian decade” (maybe even two)—a period that largely coincides with our current G-Zero era of world politics, which is defined principally by its lack of global leadership. What that means in practice is that there is no country (or group of countries) leading global responses to global problems such as climate change or the next pandemic. So, as advanced industrial economies continue to struggle to balance democracy’s dynamism with the toll globalization has taken on large segments of their societies, China’s state-capitalist approach looks set to continue barreling on.
To really understand what the world will look like in 2069, the first question we need to ask is what the United States will do in the next five to 10 years as the world continues moving away from the Pax Americana chapter of world history to whatever comes next.
