In a World Swept by Storms

With his singular genius, Shakespeare embodied in King Lear and Hamlet the features of the turbulent transition from Elizabeth I to the Jacobean era, where the old decays, the birth of the new falters, states fragment, corruption and treachery spread, unbridled individual ambition prevails, and confusion and uncertainty dominate the actions of states and leaders. How much our time resembles that Shakespearean age.

Historically, with the world’s entry into the age of the First Industrial Revolution, the great powers competed over resources and sea-lanes. No state could produce rubber or steel without controlling its resources and protecting its supply lines with armies and fleets.

For close to a hundred years, after Napoleon’s defeat in 1815 until 1914, Europe passed through an era of relative peace, in which the major European states fought only peripheral colonial wars. This was achieved thanks to eminent European leaders and diplomats—from Metternich to Bismarck.

But with the disintegration of the five world empires—the German, British, Russian, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman—the foundations of Bismarck’s peace collapsed, and Europe flared anew in wars extending from 1914–1945.

At the end of the Second World War, the Yalta agreements delineated the division of spoils and labor among the victors. For its part, the United States found itself the only state to emerge from the war intact and ascendant, its national income constituting 45 percent of global income, while the other eighteen countries were devastated by the war.

Amid the climate of the communist threat, the Western allies were fully prepared to accept American leadership. These alliances crystallized in the Bretton Woods system (1945), the essence of which was the opening of the vast American markets to the allied states, the protection of trade routes by American fleets, and the acceleration of civilizational and economic growth for the states of Western globalization. In return, America stipulated that these countries stand by it—indeed, at its forefront—in confronting communism, and that the U.S. dollar be the foundation of this system. (For its part, the communist bloc tried to create its independent market—Comecon—but it was a failed project.) After the founding of the United Nations, the Western states reinforced this project with a large package of international organizations and agreements, beginning with the International Monetary Fund and extending to the World Health Organization.

But history seems very capricious in this age; it hates stasis and stagnation!

China was soon wrested from the Soviet camp. Under the pressure of Bretton Woods and the Helsinki Accords of 1975, communism collapsed in 1991, and with it the Yalta agreements collapsed, and many states began seeking to exit the dollar system.

Thus, cracks began to spread through the edifice of Bretton Woods globalization, bringing it to the verge of collapse. And yet it continued to grow economically, culturally, and socially, so that everything became faster, better, cheaper, and more diverse, branching into complex, innovative, transcontinental production chains.

In the meantime, the United States, in the following three decades and without a clear compass, rushed into futile, failed adventures in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.

So what has changed in our world now?

1. An old order is dying:In principle, the United States’ interest in the continuation of the Bretton Woods system objectively faded, so that the historical era between 1945–1991 appears as an anomalous moment of peace that tinged the historic military conflict of the great powers and of international relations.In the 1990s, the curious portents of this unraveling were represented by the return of piracy to the Somali Sea and America’s withdrawal from it. As for now, disorder and ambiguity pervade the atmospheres of a turbulent world akin to the decade that preceded the First World War.And now, as indicators of uncertainty and apprehension rise in the behavior of the states of the world, some states find themselves crammed into existential crises pushing them toward the abyss, while other states become ferocious in order to devour them. From Crimea to Ukraine, to Gaza, to Panama, to Greenland, and Taiwan, international relations descend, again, toward the law of the jungle. And the world order reverts to before 1938.With this transformation and with the fall of the Bretton Woods system, the simple figures of economic interests no longer govern international relations and national and security calculations. Rather, geo-strategy returns to the forefront of decision-making, and power, in its material, informational, and spiritual dimensions, returns to impose itself as the standard for all calculations in international relations.And until the balances of power settle in a new world, the elements of controlling peace and interests collapse, the accords of the division of international labor collapse, and the functions of traditional international institutions fade, so that the compacts founding their function are lost and the international economic and political base is lost; thus, objectively, the system of rules, laws, and rights collapses.

2. A difficult labor for the new:The alteration of the standards of powerThe scientific–technological revolution of artificial–quantum intelligence did not content itself with overturning international relations; rather, it changed the concepts of power and hegemony from their very root. And as the wars of the last two decades have proven, brute force and material capacities are no longer a fundamental factor in hegemony and superiority; rather, information systems and AI servers are the fortified citadels of power, superiority, and hegemony—for which, and over which, wars are waged. Thus the standards of national sovereignty for states become contingent upon their ability to realize their sovereignty in cyberspace.We are, then, before a tremendous turning point that may last until the end of the current century, led with might by the locomotives of the revolution of artificial and quantum intelligence. It creates modern social beings that transcend state borders, reshaping the destiny of individuals, societies, and international relations. For transnational technology companies no longer merely sell their products; rather, they restructure societies and states to change the relations of people and states with one another, determine the directions of their development, and redraw the balances of power.And when a private company launches a rocket to rescue astronauts stuck in space for the NASA institution, the reality becomes plainly clear as to who holds the staff of development and leadership, who possesses the wherewithal to demolish old structures at the level of state and society, and who has the power to set the strategies of transformation and its horizons.

Anthropologists say that humanity went through something similar, albeit at the time less dangerous! Human groups subsisted on gathering fruits and grains that nature provided spontaneously. Then came agriculture, a qualitative leap that furnished humans with a great amount of dense energy latent in the grains of wheat and rice.This sweeping development allowed for the rise of cities and empires of Mesopotamia and the Nile and the Yellow River, etc. And thanks to this “strategic weapon,” the agrarian peoples were able to subjugate the gathering-and-herding peoples, who did not possess fertile land and agricultural knowledge. But, in the end, those peoples surrendered and became, willingly or by war, armies of slaves, worshipping the kings of the agrarian civilizations.And although the experts of artificial intelligence themselves admit that they do not grasp the dimensions of the present turning point and cannot predict its repercussions, they say that five years or less separate us from the consolidation of this turning point, which they are discovering will be the most important and most dangerous turning point in human history.And when the experts warn of the miserable backwardness of policymakers and opinion-makers, with their antiquated tools, represented at best by the internet and email, behold the rapidly accelerating locomotive of transformation topples them. Indeed, the experts, with great derision, recall the hearing in the U.S. Congress with Mark Zuckerberg, the director of “Facebook,” so that their ignorance appears declared and naked before the young technocrats.And so it is with agriculture in this age! For these experts say that humanity has managed to reduce the labor power required to produce a ton of wheat by fiftyfold since the advent of agriculture, and they now expect artificial intelligence to reduce production costs by hundreds, indeed thousands of times in the next five years. And this will be realized by whoever possesses the capacity for adaptation and possesses the technology and the knowledge.For there is no longer any difference between the strategic military sectors and the civilian sectors in any state. They have all, from health to the university and industry, to all aspects of life, become arenas for strategic and security competition and penetration.

3. Quantum intelligence chips: the focal point of the global struggle:A few states and companies monopolize the nerve of the present sweeping transformation, namely, the manufacture of quantum intelligence chips! And while the chips are divided into low-resolution chips (which we now use in our daily lives), and medium and ultra-high resolution, only the ultra chips possess AI technologies exclusively, and around them a merciless war breaks out.The United States claims that it has managed to form an exclusive strategic alliance to control the supply chains of ultra chips, and China is investing hundreds of billions in this feverish race in chip and artificial intelligence technologies. For the issue here is not commercial but strategic, and China strains with all its energy to break this monopoly.This transformation creates a new global system, entirely separate from the traditional national and international security system. Indeed, this system ushers the world into a new stage of stratification among humans and states. A new class division in which people, companies, and states are ranked according to their possession of and control over the runaway locomotive of quantum artificial intelligence. This will soon be reflected in labor relations, in the relations of companies with states, and in the relations of security with technologies, culminating in the hegemony of quantum technology over culture and values and over international relations.In this sense, some experts expect the role of the nation-state in the “Westphalian” form—which has hypothetically constituted the cornerstone in the structure of international relations—to recede. Accordingly, they bet on a gradual retreat of the position and utility of the nation-state, in favor of new global and regional entities born of the ongoing tectonic transformations.What is happening now?This transformation is no longer a giant knocking at the door; rather, the giant pierces the courtyard of every neighborhood and city to throw open conflicts wide. And America is now paying the fine for the strategic laziness and excessive self-indulgence of American elites and businessmen over the past three decades, for it, instead of

In formulating a conception of America’s place in a post–Bretton Woods, post–Cold War world, it lost its compass after it lost the ideological and obvious enemy. And here it is discovering for itself the extent to which American means of production lag behind other advanced countries in integrating information and cybernetic systems into production operations and into the life of society.

While its old industry no longer constitutes more than 12% of the size of its economy, the service sector swells to become transborder, and the public debt swells to astronomical figures, while America discovers the aging of its legal and political structure, so that the generational struggle over values, wealth, and opportunities deepens within it. Indeed, America also discovers that major states among its allies are pulling the rug out from under the dollar—the nerve of its global power and the foundational force of its prosperity—so that overt and covert alliances arise internationally that undermine its leadership.

The loud question in Washington has become: What is to be done?

In hurried haste, the United States pivots violently to wage its battle and make up for lost time. It shakes off its alliances, to engage in competition not over resources—for it possesses many—but in the field of technological, informational, and quantum competition and the struggle over markets.

And as the United States makes China its principal adversary, and as Trump uses sweeping tariffs to dismantle the Bretton Woods system, the United States dismantles the last remaining bonds of the Western alliance, so that its role as a “policeman” guaranteeing peace, law, and the global economy falls without return, and international relations proceed toward a world in which the great powers do as they please, and in which small states suffer the hegemony of great states that struggle over them and divide them into shares in a new division of international labor.

Our world has become, de facto, multipolar. But this transformation does not mean a withdrawal, for the United States, from its global role; rather, it means a repositioning that restructures its geo-strategic space.

Instead of bearing the burden of the world order with its gains and costs, and instead of the burden and costs of protecting trade, the economy, and the international order, and instead of wars over resources, and instead of its catastrophic dependency on China—instead of all that—the United States turns inward toward its immediate strategic environment and focuses on reinforcing its hegemony over it and expanding its markets, pulls back to its territory the industrial base it built around the world, and increases its share of fossil energy. But America, above all, invests trillions of dollars in propelling the revolution of artificial intelligence.

And if the United States presses upon its strategic space—Mexico and Canada and some Latin American states—to reinforce its hegemony over it, that is by way of subjecting its environment itself to the terms of a renewed partnership.

America, pride in the model:Americans take pride in their model not because it is the most moral, nor because it is the most just, but because it is the fiercest in accelerating competition and progress. Through a turbulent welter of conflict, the American model combines innovation, unbridled competition, and the fusion of academia, technology, and business. They take pride that their state model allows for a dramatic, sweeping adaptation of the economy and enables society to change its political skin according to the shifts of challenges. And with the same measure of conceit, they bet on the failure of the model of the centralized state and monopolistic state capitalism among their Chinese competitors.

Demographically, America finds itself twenty years behind the level of dangerous fertility decline in the advanced countries of Europe, Russia, China, and East Asia—and it finds good in that. And although fertility rates in America are declining, they are still relatively acceptable in a way that ensures a broad consumer base, a matter that gives it an opportunity to adapt to the transformations in the labor force toward cybernetics and the quantum-intelligent economy. For many Americans still live in spacious suburban homes that provide the suitable climate for a multi-child family.

Despite everything being said regarding immigrants, the United States continues to compensate for declining fertility by selectively absorbing immigrants and the skilled.By comparison, the demographic position in other advanced countries is deteriorating rapidly. Migrants from the countrysides of these countries live in small apartments in the suburbs of Asian and European cities; fertility declines, and neighborhoods crowded with the elderly and retirees become a burden on civilizational growth, so that the market contracts and reliance on exports increases.And as the United States retains its vast internal market, it comfortably relies on the fact that it trades with the outside world at only 12 percent of its national income, and that half of this exchange takes place with its American and Latin neighbors. And now President Trump casts the Reagan economic doctrine into the ash heap of history, with no return, benefiting from the shortcomings of his predecessor presidents, in what he deems an opportunity to reinvent the government in its entirety and to make a final break with Reaganism.With every turn in science and technology and with every leap in the means of production and labor relations, America suffers the travail of arduous transformations that almost tear it apart. Such was its condition after 1929, and so it was in the seventies: the hippies, Vietnam, Kennedy, Luther King, etc. And so it is now! So that democracy becomes a tool in the service of freedom, and not an end in itself. Will it succeed now?

European cohesion, Trump’s unintended miracle!From the time of Charlemagne until 1945, Europe’s history was a bloody—indeed, savage—struggle. And like our present Middle East, Europe was a house to all ethnic and national asabiyyas, divided among churches, the hoary glories of races, and the sanctity of “every inch” of land, so that historians would say that Europe is resistant to peace! Despite its heritage and its advanced civilizational reality, it seemed as far as could be from the wisdom of concord and the grace of peace. For just as geography united Europe, so did national sentiments and its awful, bloody history divide it. But history also teaches us that nothing unites Europe like external dangers: it has always united against Napoleon, against Hitler, and against communism.For its part, Europe grew complacent and gave priority to purely economic interests on the pretext that economic bonds constitute a guarantee against wars—ignoring the lessons of its own history, as British–German relations were at their zenith on the eve of the First World War. Nevertheless, Europe demobilized two-thirds of its armies and 80 percent of its fleets and war industry, and even exported heavy, labor-intensive industries far from its territory.Then Europe became besieged by threats east and west. After Ukraine, and the outbreak of conflict within Europe and the growth of the nuclear threat, President Trump hastens to apply sweeping sanctions on the European economy and proceeds to abandon his country’s Atlantic commitments, so that Europe feels completely strategically exposed.Before the tsunami of dangers coming from east and west, Europe surges with all its energy to ward them off. And here is Scandinavia joining with the Baltic states, the Balkan states, and Britain in a hurried effort to form a protective strategic wall.For its part, Europe’s war industries set to work, and its armies—which have not contributed to serious wars for decades—engage in training, quasi-combat, and unified operations.The Scandinavian countries, all of which have joined the Atlantic alliance, tighten their belts to turn into naval fortresses dominating the North Sea and the Baltic Sea. And Turkey turns into a rear industrial yard supporting Ukraine, and Britain engages in European efforts to confront Trump’s tariffs and to reinforce European defenses in Eastern Europe, entering into binding secondary alliances with Ukraine, the Baltic states, and the Scandinavian countries.

Economically, Germany, France, and Britain need, as never before, an integrated European space. And despite Brexit, Britain is slowly returning to European warmth.

A Concise Outline of the Chinese Approach to the International SituationChina works from a wise, long-term logic that relies on cumulative small gains in the context of avoiding a challenge to the world order. Internal stability in China constitutes a serious priority. But the essence of this stability lies in ensuring vertical expansion in development while maintaining a high pace of horizontal growth, developing the middle class and the domestic market, and solving the major dilemma represented by disparities in levels of development and disparities in economic patterns.But experts estimate that the Chinese leadership still enjoys a long-term ability to maintain alliances and understandings between it and the Chinese business community with the aim of continuing to make the existing experiment succeed. It also relies heavily on the prosperity of China’s growing academic infrastructure.China finds real strategic risks in the possibility of an attempt by the United States to impose its direct hegemony over international economic passages, especially with regard to global trade routes at Bab al-Mandeb and the Red Sea and the Strait of Malacca in the Indian Ocean. Therefore China is trying to prepare to transition to play its role in guaranteeing the sea-lanes that matter to it, relying on its own capacities and alliances. But it still needs to accumulate more capacities and capabilities to become ready for such a task.

Transformations of the Global EconomyAs we noted above, the world is gradually shifting from conflict over resources toward conflict over innovation and markets.In this context, reliance on exports plays a decisive role in the degree of linkage of the national production cycle. The degree of this effect depends on the extent of integration of exports with national production, labor markets, innovation, and economic flexibility.China relies excessively on exports at more than approximately 25% of GDP, a matter that provides China the ability to generate tens of millions of jobs, and export surpluses finance the process of expansion in infrastructure and investments in the construction sector.But, in return, the Chinese model opens the national economy to the fluctuations of global demand and to the decline of the United States’ and the European Union’s appetite to purchase from China, a matter that strikes national manufacturing centers, especially in coastal areas.While the United States relies at a low level on exports, which reach approximately 11% of GDP, the culture of consumption spurs an increase in labor productivity and the expansion of the domestic market. Experts in the United States believe that the breadth of the American domestic market makes the economy more flexible in global crises and enables it to expand its monetary and fiscal options.For its part, the euro area relies very heavily on exports at approximately 55% of GDP. And while integration across borders allows for feeding internal and external exports, reliance on external markets often conceals weak domestic consumption and the slowdown of domestic demand, which makes the euro area extremely sensitive to disruptions in global trade, energy prices, and sanctions regimes.

A European and Asian Economic–Military Alliance

From Macron of France, to Mertz of Germany, to Starmer of Britain, and Carney of Canada, the Australians—and even New Zealand and Japan—join in urgent talks for market unity and a strategic and economic alliance.“This divorce with the United States was a big wake-up call for all of us,” thus comments the European military press. While Canada prepares to suspend a $13 billion aircraft deal with the United States, Britain shocked the United States with the offer it presented to Canada and other allied countries, such as Australia, Sweden, and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, to supply them with sixth-generation GCAP aircraft as an alternative to the expensive F-35. And in the face of the numerous technical stumbling blocks from which the American F-35 suffers, the European aircraft are offered at lower costs and with operational benefits matching the F-35—and even surpassing it in some specifications.The United Kingdom offers the GCAP Open Door program, a joint air-combat program that includes Japan and Italy, which is participating in the development of a sixth-generation aircraft, where the informatics inputs of the “Five Eyes” (the countries participating in the global information system) interact with the emergent capabilities of artificial intelligence and sensors, and network warfare.This alliance, in turn, opens fields of leading technological cooperation and wide economic (ones), as an alternative to alliance with the United States. And Portugal, for its part, canceled its F-35 order, to be followed by many European countries. Indeed, the Canadians say that they possess all the natural resources necessary to rebuild their national defenses and to build aircraft, drones, tanks, and ships. And despite the central position of the special AUKUS agreements to purchase American nuclear-powered submarines, Australia’s uncertainty about American policy has intensified, and it has set a plan to diversify its defense partnerships and to join the GCAP defense project.

What About the Regional System in the Middle East?

In a time when the global economy is turning into protectionist spaces, experts offer their predictions regarding the most dynamic countries in this rising competition. And they set a set of specifications for the countries that enjoy the greatest opportunities to respond to global transformations. 1. A medium and flexible demography that can mobilize its capacities and resources with flexibility. 2. Strategic importance in the multipolar system. 3. An advanced, dynamic economy that receives advanced takeoff projects. 4. Political stability and civil peace. 5. An active domestic market that allows local industry to flourish.

The Regional Situation in the Middle East and the Gulf

Global conditions impose a profound process of transformation in the Middle East—whether it concerns vital sea-lanes, the global economy, or the horizons of development and the growth of industry, technologies, and urbanization in the region—so that the question of forming a unified strategic–economic space in the region becomes a vital question of survival for the entirety of the area.The Arab Gulf states enjoy leading strategic and political capacities to be the founding pillar of this regional strategic space. And the foundational structural transformations led by His Highness Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi Crown Prince—which include all aspects of life in the Kingdom, from the structure of the state, to society, politics, culture, and innovation—offer broad horizons. Likewise, the broad societal alliance of the forces of youth enables the strengthening of cohesion and identity and consecrates the Kingdom’s regional and international role.Therefore we can say with confidence that the present transformations allow for maximizing the status and power of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, so that it will be the founding pillar of this regional strategic space.

It is the great void that is seeking the Kingdom to fill it!There is a strategic void in regional leadership as a result of the decline of stabilizing factors and the aggravation of the risks of regional war. There is also a strategic void in the management of the security of sea-lanes, a grievous void in the protection of regional and international supply and production chains, and a void in managing the doctrinal and cultural dimension of the Mashriqi and global Islamic sphere in this century. For the Islamic world lies at the heart of strategic transformations that are economically promising, whether in terms of resources and raw materials or in terms of its productive and market importance.

And after the Cold War, for several decades, cut strategic communication between the north of the Mediterranean and Europe on the one hand and the south of the Mediterranean and the expanse of the Arabian Peninsula on the other, the weakness from which many Mediterranean states suffer gives the Kingdom an exceptional position to bridge the gap from the position of a peer ally.

These facts do not entail the insertion of the Arab Mashriq and the Arabian Peninsula—especially the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia—into any of the contending poles in the world; on the contrary, the peer posture and relations of partnership may be the appropriate positioning for the Kingdom and for the region.

In a time when a policy grounded in preferring peace and warding off wars, and avoiding entanglement in any of the conflicts, constitutes an immense latent power for the Arab Gulf states, these states become a fundamental factor in maximizing the drawing power of the Middle Eastern regional system.

It is a historic opportunity to build a new regional axis—rational, flexible—that balances between national identity and regional openness, and that transcends the logic of wars and polarization. And as great as the opportunities are, so much greater and graver are the risks of ignoring them.

For the states that lose their capacity for governance will soon lose their existence as a state. For the West no longer sees itself as morally responsible for the collapse of states and their failure amid the present disintegration of globalization. Rather, the world is heading toward a more utilitarian and pragmatic logic, so that every state becomes responsible for itself and for building its developmental economic model; otherwise it will be left behind by the train.

History does not help us to foresee what comes after the storm, but it undoubtedly teaches us to anticipate it, teaches us to see the features of cracking in the present and the impossibility of its continuance, and teaches us to take precautions and to prepare for the deluge.

And as the Scriptures say, had Noah waited for the flood to build his ark, all creatures would have drowned to the very last one.

Suggested References:

1. Decline of the Bretton Woods System & Rise of Multipolarity

• Operation and Demise of the Bretton Woods System (1958–1971)
Read on CEPR »

• Fifty Years On: Lessons from Bretton Woods – Oxford Review of Economic Policy
Read on Oxford Academic »

• Bretton Woods 2.0: A Global Monetary System for a Multipolar World – The National Interest
 

• Read on National Interest »

2. Quantum AI & Geopolitical Technology Shift

• Quantum AI: Transforming Geopolitical Dynamics
Read on Command Eleven »

• Artificial Intelligence and Its Ascendancy in Global Power Dynamics
Read on Architecture & Governance »

• Quantum Cryptanalysis and Its Impact on Global Power
Read the report from BISI UK »

3. Multipolarity in the Middle East & the Gulf

• The GCC in a Multipolar World: Navigating Rivalries and Building Alliances – ISPI
Read on ISPI Online »

• The Rise of a Multipolar West Asia: Why the Middle East Resists Hegemony
Read on PeaceDiplomacy.org »

• Saudi Arabia’s Strategic Vision in a Changing World
Read on Arab News »

4. U.S. Strategic Repositioning & Technological Race

• The Geopolitics of the AI-Relevant Semiconductor Supply Chain
Read the report from the Geneva Graduate Institute (PDF) »

• I2U2 Group: A New Quad in the Making? (Indo-Abrahamic Alliance) 
Read on Wikipedia »

 5. China's Technological Rise & AI-Chip Strategy

•  Quantum Computing and Its Geopolitical Impacts
Read on Medium »

•  China's Strategic AI Agenda and Global Implications
Read on Trends Research »

 6. Historical Parallels & Power Transitions

• How Quantum Tech Could Upend Global Power Structures
Read on CIGI (Centre for International Governance Innovation) »