Navigating a More Dangerous World: How Can We Survive and Prosper?

Middle powers can, through cooperation, retain the rules and institutions they still value.

I don’t need to describe the wars under way in Ukraine and Iran, the tensions between China, the US and Japan, or, indeed, the tensions between the US and its longstanding allies in Asia and Europe in order to convince readers that these are turbulent times. But what is new about this turbulence? And why should we pay special attention now?

The two new features of today’s turbulence, compared with times such as after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the US, or during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, are, first, for the first time since the end of the Cold War we are now seeing conflict and dangerous confrontation between the world’s superpowers, America, Russia and China; and, second, that really for the first time since 1945, the US is treating its network of allies and the array of global institutions and treaties that it set up in the post-war years as enemies rather than friends, as burdens rather than assets.

Two Potential Approaches

At the obvious risk of over-simplifying, I would say, moreover, that there are two prevailing ways of reacting to these new features and to the turbulence we are seeing.

One is to say that what we are seeing is the world reverting to its historical norm: of a great-power competition in which hard power, both military and economic, is dominant. ‘Might is right’, some say. Such a world can feel like one in which, to quote a great historian in Ancient Greece, ‘The strong do what they can, while the weak suffer what they must’. In such a world, those unlucky enough not to live in one of the great powers can feel like helpless onlookers, whose only options are to hide or to adapt if they are to protect their interests.

The other way of reacting is that of Mark Carney, the Canadian Prime Minister, who made a now famous 17-minute speech at Davos in January 2026. It is fair to say that, for Europeans and for the Japanese, ‘we are all Canadians now’. Carney’s approach is to accept that the old world has gone, that great-power competition is rife and that valued institutions and rules are now weaker or even broken, but to say in response that the world’s very many ‘middle powers’ can and must collaborate with one another in order to cope with this situation. We can, in other words, make ourselves stronger, more resilient and less dependent on the bullying superpowers by working together. And, he argued, together we can preserve or rebuild some of the rules and institutions that we cherish.

Which is correct? The answer, as in most things in life, lies somewhere in between.

The confrontation between the three great powers is real, permanent and dangerous. In some senses, indeed, we can already say we are witnessing something that can be called ‘World War Three’ since in the major conflicts under way all the three great powers are involved, whether directly or by supply of weapons, technology and finance. In February 2022, Russia and China published a Joint Statement making quite clear that they intend to work together to undermine and ideally destroy Western dominance of global governance and institutions.

Temporary or Structural US Changes?

Having won elections on the basis of pledging to stop wars, President Trump has now started one – jointly with Israel – in which Russia and China are both supporting Iran, and which has huge potential consequences for world supplies of energy and other critical commodities, and which has no end in sight.

Trump has complained loudly about America’s NATO allies’ refusal to join his war, calling us cowards and unpatriotic. In doing so he conveniently forgets that his own National Security Strategy just three months ago declared an official American intention to intervene in the domestic politics of European countries and stated that under Europe’s current policies the continent is facing what they called ‘civilisational erasure’. He has also, of course, imposed the highest tariffs on imports from our countries to America for one hundred years and made extortionate demands on us to finance investments in the US. And he wonders why we have not rushed to his side.

The issue that is harder to judge is that of whether this change of American behaviour – of becoming as predatory as Russia and China, of treating allies with disdain, of concentrating power in the hands of the President – should be thought of as personal to Donald Trump and his period in office, or as somehow structural, in other words permanent. Some elements of it are clearly personal, especially his vindictiveness, his corrupt behaviour, the way he takes decisions without engaging much of a wider governmental system.

I do not think we should believe that European leaders will have to say to future American presidents things like ‘only you can bring peace, Donald’, as Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi did, nor call him ‘Daddy’, as the NATO Secretary General did. They will not all be narcissists. Future presidents will govern again through a system, not as absolute monarchs. Checks and balances will be restored.

However, the part of Trump’s personal impact that will become in effect structural is that he has broken so many precedents and so many apparent rules that the boundaries of what is possible from an American president may well have widened, permanently. The next president may behave very differently, if the pendulum of politics is allowed to swing in the way it usually does in a democracy like America, but foreign allies and businesses will now always have to bear in mind that America might at some point in the future again elect someone with Trump’s attitudes, even if not with identical behaviour. The unilateralism of his ‘America First’ was in any case not new – we all accused George W. Bush and his ‘neocons’ of being unilateralists at the time of the Iraq invasion. And it is not likely to go away altogether.

One other clear structural feature is that while America evidently still thinks like a superpower that can do anything it wants, it no longer feels an instinctive urge to shoulder global burdens nor to sacrifice its economic interests for security or foreign policy goals, as it did in the past. This doesn’t mean that 15% tariffs are here to stay but it does mean that future American presidents may well take a tough line on the rest of us, based on their perceptions of national interests.

Shared Interests, Not Values

In facing up to this change in the US, many Europeans would benefit from learning from Japan and other Asian countries. Japan and its South-East Asian neighbours have never believed, unlike us Europeans, that their relationship with America is based on shared values. It has been a matter of shared interests. Plenty of previous American presidents have been bullies towards Japan and other Asian nations. But shared interests kept the relationship intact.

It is likely to be the same now, and in the world after Trump – for there will be one. But now, and in that post-Trump world, as Mark Carney said, we middle powers also share interests with one another. And we can recognise that, vast though the US and China both are, they do not define the world. More than 85% of world trade is not trade with the US. South-East Asia and South Asia are now growing faster, on a consistent basis, than China is.

The continued spread of economic development is creating options: options for businesses in terms of markets and for supply-chain diversification; options for governments in terms of political and commercial agreements such as CPTPP; options for effective collaboration over joint issues such as critical minerals, climate change, health, and even security.

Great Power Rivalry

Great-power rivalry will remain and will continue to pose the biggest dangers to all of us in terms of war and peace. Any belief that, as under the 1945 United Nations Charter, national territorial boundaries can no longer be changed by force has been well and truly shattered, by Russia, by China and now by the US. International law is not dead, but it is badly wounded.

The Ukraine war shows no sign of ending, for Russia shows no sign of being willing to bring its invasion to an end, even though that invasion has cost its military well over one million casualties for only tiny amounts of territorial gain. Europe has been taught that Russia really is a serious threat to its own security.

The Iran war very much looks like it could get worse before it gets better, notwithstanding the fact that talks are under way between Iran and the US. The impact of the war on the prices of energy and other key commodities depends very much on how long it lasts and what the outcome is in terms of the openness of shipping lanes.

Governments are currently behaving as if they are paralysed in the face of that uncertainty. They describe this as the worst energy shock the world has ever seen while also taking very little corresponding action, because in truth they don’t yet know how bad and how prolonged it will prove to be. But this inaction cannot itself go on for long. The case for serious investment in diversified, resilient energy supplies, which will have to mean a combination of renewable energy and nuclear energy, is becoming clearer by the day.

China is benefiting from both of these wars, which is probably also why it is quietly helping Russia and Iran to continue them. The risk that it might be tempted to exploit America’s over-stretch and the likely weakness of Donald Trump in the face of it is growing. I think it is growing from a low base, as Chinese President Xi Jinping is much more risk-averse than Vladimir Putin, and knows that the costs of attempting military action over Taiwan or in a smaller way over the Philippines could be very high indeed. Nonetheless, all of us, and especially businesses, do need to think through the possibility that something risky and dramatic might happen in the lndo-Pacific region too.

At an official level, the Carney ‘middle-power’ collaboration process will deepen as well as widen. We all have to create options, to build the capacity to resist or influence the bullying superpowers and to reduce our dependencies on them. As Carney surely knows, we cannot kid ourselves that the superpowers do not exist; but we in Europe, Japan and Canada also should not kid ourselves that when America turns back towards alliances and the West, in the world after Trump, that everything will just be back to normal. It cannot be.

For businesses, in the time of geopolitical turbulence, the important principle is also that we cannot take anything for granted. We may make predictions, we may make assumptions about how tomorrow’s trends will reflect those of today and yesterday, for we have to. But we also have to accept that politics has the power to destroy those assumptions in an instant, not just in some beleaguered region far away but all over the world. Economic and technological change happens gradually enough to be able to monitor and, generally, assess it. Political change can be much more abrupt.

So, we all have to be back in a world not of prediction but of preparation: a world of uncertain scenarios, which requires serious thinking about risks and contingency planning.