Dynamics of Polycrisis 2.0

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The year since Donald Trump’s accession to power has seen an intense augmentation of the global polycrisis. It has also seen a few shifts in its basic dynamics. This commentary reviews fifteen continuing dynamics of the polycrisis and examines how they have changed over the past year.

 

 

There is always a danger of forcing a complex and contradictory reality into a procrustean grand synthesis, or, conversely, seeing each tree as a one-off rather than part of the forest. In my commentaries on the polycrisis I try to acknowledge the chaotic and contradictory character of the current world order while identifying some of the main trends developing within it. In my June 2024 commentary, drawing on the ideas of many other people, I laid out 15 “dynamics of the polycrisis.” In this commentary I review 2025 and current prospects in terms of these tendencies:

Unleashed Warfare

Wars, always a feature of the polycrisis, have proliferated. There are more than 60 armed conflicts between states, the most since World War II. They include fighting in Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan, Somalia, Myanmar, and the Sahel and violent conflicts between Thailand and Cambodia, Afghanistan and Pakistan, India and Pakistan, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Israel and Iran. The US has already attacked or threatened military action against Iran, Venezuela, Nigeria, Somalia, Canada, Greenland, Cuba, and Columbia, among others. In 2025 the U.S. carried out or contributed to 622 overseas bombing missions around the world. As the New Start arms control treaty expires, the US, Russia and China have entered a conventional and nuclear arms race, while additional countries are making preparations to go nuclear. Global defense spending is expected to reach $2.6 trillion in 2026, up 8% over 2025. The objectives of military power have expanded from defense and domination to outright plunder; as the International Crisis Group put it, Trump’s “lawlessness, revisionism and cavalier use of force” risk “normalizing the idea that war is an OK way for powerful states to get what they want.” According to an analysis of “Systemic Risk And Escalation Dynamics In Global Politics,”

“The 2026–2027 period marks a critical phase in the international system, best described as a systemic crisis of governability. Across multiple regions, crises—both active and latent—are increasingly interconnected, creating conditions in which local tensions can quickly escalate into broader instability. . . and trigger escalation beyond political control.”

Vicious Circles of Conflict

Conflicts aggravated by tit-for-tat escalation are creating dangers that are in nobody’s interest and that nobody can control. The war between Ukraine and Russia, with their European, Chinese, and other backers and their American manipulator seeking opportunities for plunder provides a prime example: The war has produced growing circles of devastating bombing of civilian areas on both sides; cycles of drone war escalation; provocative probing of NATO territories by Russia; and threats of nuclear escalation. The Eurasia group predicts that “a more assertive NATO posture” is likely to “increase the risk of an escalatory spiral.” The result: “more direct, more frequent, and more dangerous Russia-NATO confrontations.” Such escalating conflicts – sometimes punctuated by brief respites – have occurred repeatedly between India and Pakistan, India and China, and numerous other “hot spots.” The dynamics of vicious circles are vividly illustrated by the many arms races going on around the world.

Breakdown of International Cooperation

Long before the election of Donald Trump, international cooperation to address the world’s most threatening problems had largely broken down. Action for peacekeeping, arms limitation, climate protection, economic cooperation, water use, fighting pandemics and other public health threats, and action to address threats from new technologies, such as nanotechnology, drones, and Artificial Intelligence atrophied or worse. Now Trump has withdrawn the US entirely from 66 international organizations responsible for addressing such global needs. Several countries have refused to join his “Board of Peace” because they see it as an effort to undermine the United Nations. As the Eurasia Group recently put it, “When the next global crisis hits, there will be no ‘committee to save the world.’”

Thucydides Trap

According to Adam Tooze, the rise of China is “the single most dramatic socioeconomic transformation in the history of our species, bar none, full stop.” From the start, the polycrisis has been marked by the rivalry between China and the US –an example of what is sometimes known as the “Thucydides trap” of conflict between rising and dominant powers. Trump’s escalating tariffs on China, designed to cripple the Chinese economy, reached 145%. They were met by Chinese retaliation, above all the restriction of rare earth minerals and magnets. This turned out to be a devastating blow. After six weeks Trump cried uncle and the two sides declared a moratorium on their trade war. Whether this will be more than as temporary trade detente, and whether it will extend beyond trade issues, remains to be seen. Taiwan and the South China and East China Seas remain potential military flashpoints. Meanwhile, the US assertion after its attacks on Venezuela of a “Don-roe doctrine” restoring US domination throughout Latin America is generating direct confrontation between the US and China: Trade between China, Latin America, and the Caribbean has grown from $12 billion in 2000 to $315 billion in 2020, with projections indicating it could surpass $700 billion by 2035.

War Crime Wave

Israel, backed by the US, has conducted in Gaza the most visible genocide in world history. The US attack on Venezuela is a transparent violation of international law. Both Russia and Ukraine are conducting massive attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure that are clearly crimes against humanity. According to the Secretary-General of the UN, “crises where civilians are bearing the brunt of violations of international law that may amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity include the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Myanmar, Sudan, Ukraine and Yemen.” International law, often flouted in practice, is now being openly scorned in principle. Donald Trump said in a recent interview with The New York  Times, “I don’t need international law.” His aide Steven Miller explicitly spelled out the doctrine of might makes right: “We live in a world, in the real world, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”

Fragmented Globalization

For the four decades after 1980 a process of economic globalization increasingly integrated the global economy. The polycrisis saw a continued expansion of trans-border economic activity, but also the rise of Great Power bullying designed to gain control over global economic networks, ranging from energy sources to semiconductors. As Canadian prime minister Mark Carney noted in his widely noted speech to the World Economic Forum at Davos, “great powers have begun using economic integration as weapons, tariffs as leverage, financial infrastructure as coercion, supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited.” Or, as the Eurasia Group put it, “The geopolitical “great game” used to be about physical territory. Today it’s increasingly about who controls data flows, platform rules, AI systems, and the critical minerals and energy infrastructure that power them.” The world is “too interconnected to carve up” and “power is too fragmented across too many domains and actors” for any great power to hold a sphere together. “The law of the jungle is back.” Trump’s weaponization of tariffs has taken this tendency to the extreme. However, so far the result is not to establish either US hegemony or new economic blocs, but rather an increasingly polycentric global economy with less powerful countries opting for “poly-alignment” with multiple state and economic actors.

Geopolitics Trumps All

 

 

Until the Great Recession, US economic, political, and military hegemony was largely an accepted fact of life; growth within a globalizing economy was the near-universal priority of corporations and states. But with the advent of the polycrisis, economic and indeed all other concerns were increasingly subsumed by geopolitical conflict among the three great powers. This reality was recognized in Canadian prime minister Mark Carney’s widely publicized Davos proclamation of “a rupture in the world order” where “geopolitics is submitted to no limits, no constraints. Call it what it is – a system of intensifying great power rivalry, where the most powerful pursue their interests, using economic integration as coercion.”

This was still an intentional pursuit of national purposes, but polycrisis geopolitics is now shifting, to borrow a term from Richard Falk, toward “nihilistic geopolitics” oblivious to meaning, morality, or knowledge. Rational, realistic pursuit of national self-interest is increasingly passing over into bullying and plunder, with little regard to their actual consequences.

While that Great Power rivalry remains in play, private and corporate greed are playing a growing role in shaping global processes; the grab for personal wealth by the likes of Trump, Musk, Putin, and the oligarchs around them increasingly deflect from the single-minded drive for national power. Great power objectives are based less on pursuit of long-range advancement and more on short-term acquisition and plunder. According to the New York Times, Trump has used the office of the presidency to make at least $1.4 billion.

At the same time, global corporations are showing less deference to their supposedly “home” nations; witness the defiance by the “US” oil companies of Trump’s demands that they take over and invest in the oil industry of Venezuela. Overall, the relations among great powers and “their” national corporations are in flux. What the Eurasia Group calls “State Capitalism with American Characteristics,” includes “leveraging tariffs, equity stakes, revenue-sharing deals, regulatory leverage, and access to US markets and technology.”

“The administration’s willingness to let Nvidia sell AI chips to China for a 25% revenue share signals that commercial interests can trump strategic competition. Gulf chip sales follow the same pattern—strategic AI leverage traded for commercial gain. The TikTok resolution prioritized Trump-aligned investors and political gain over risk mitigation.”

With political leaders of Trump’s ilk, it is not evident that the national interest matters to them at all, let alone more than personal, family, and crony wealth and power.

Inequality

According to a January report from Oxfam, billionaire fortunes have grown at a rate three times faster than the previous five years since the election of Donald Trump in November 2024. While US billionaires have seen the sharpest growth in their fortunes, billionaires in the rest of the world have also seen double digit increases. The number of billionaires has surpassed 3,000 for the first time, and the level of billionaire wealth is now higher than at any time in history. The world’s 12 richest billionaires have more wealth than the poorest half of humanity, or more than four billion people Meanwhile, one in four people globally face hunger. Unrestrained borrowing by the world’s richest countries “threatens to hamstring growth and sow financial instability around the globe”; in six of the seven wealthy Group of 7 nations the national debt equals or exceeds the country’s annual economic output.

Democracy Deficit

While elections continue to be held in most countries around the world, autocratic, plutocratic, and kleptocratic rule is spreading. The United States, as the Eurasia Group observed, is experiencing a political revolution: “President Donald Trump’s attempt to systematically dismantle the checks on his power, capture the machinery of government, and weaponize it against his enemies.” What began as “tactical norm-breaking” has become a “system-level transformation.” Plutocrats have rapidly extended their control of media: nine of the top ten social media companies in the world are run by just six billionaires; 8 of the top 10 AI companies are billionaire-run, with just three commanding nearly 90% of the generative AI chatbot market. Violent suppression of political opposition has intensified from Iran to Kenya to Minneapolis.

Rise of Fascist and Para-Fascist Movements

Para-fascist parties – those with acknowledged or unacknowledged fascist characteristics — have increased their vote in Europe and elsewhere. Governments, notably the US, are using their power to support para-fascists around the world, illustrated by J.D. Vance’s support for rightwing parties in Europe and Trump’s $20 billion bailout to Argentine president Javier Milei to win his reelection. Meanwhile, mainstream politicians around the world have adopted far-right policies, such as racialized border control, hostility towards migrants, suppression of dissent, and expanded policing powers. Political leaders increasingly espouse might-makes-right ideology. As the most recent Doomsday Clock announcement points out, “The current autocratic trend impedes international cooperation, reduces accountability, and acts as a threat accelerant, making dangerous nuclear, climatic, and technological threats all the harder to reverse.”

Climate crisis

 

 

2025 saw the crackup of global cooperation to fight global warming. The US under Donald Trump not only withdrew from the Paris climate agreement, but promoted expansion of fossil fuel extraction and burning while attempting to use the power of the US government to obliterate the surging global rise of fossil-free energy technologies. Many countries drew back from their timetables for a transition off fossil fuels and many corporations abandoned their commitments to climate protection. Greentech advances, based largely on Chinese research and investment, were increasingly introduced around the world, but the extraction and burning of fossil fuels continued to grow, despite rapid increases in fires, floods, storms, heatwaves, and other devastating manifestations of global warming. The level of atmospheric carbon dioxide reached a new high, rising to 150 percent of preindustrial levels.

Incoherence

The polycrisis has become even more complex, contradictory, and chaotic. Apparent trends and tendencies conflict. Policymaking is increasingly erratic, incoherent, and self-contradictory, with results far different from intent. As a Foreign Policy review put it, “The world remains in a protracted interregnum, still unsettled, fragmenting, but no less contested.” The world is “approaching an inflection point, where discontinuity—war, financial crisis, or natural disaster—buries the post-Cold War era and ushers in a new, unknowable order.”

Unpredictability

The world order has become even more unpredictable, even for those with a vantage point on the inside or the top. Trump’s unpredictability aggravates the unpredictability of the whole system. Who would have predicted, even a week before, that the US and China would flip from a trade war to a trade detente? That Latin America, more than Taiwan, would become the flashpoint of US-Chinese conflict? Or that European countries would send military forces to Greenland to forestall a US invasion? As Margaret MacMillan put it in the New York Times,

“We are living in a time of what’s been called radical uncertainty. We are in a transition in which the previous system is unraveling but we don’t yet know what comes next. Predictability, which is essential for global peace, is not a feature of this world. In fact, making predictions would be a mug’s game. There are too many disruptive factors, such as unpredictable electorates, trade wars, artificial intelligence (and its attendant investment bubbles), aging populations and a warming planet.”

The decision makers must “make it up as they go along.” Wars can start by accident, but “once started they are hard to control or end, and can consume all in their way, like a forest fire.”

Decline of Social Learning

The world order increasingly plunges into self-destructive actions without recognition that past experience has proven their futility. Aggressive use of tariffs in the past has regularly led to trade wars and mutual impoverishment, yet it is burgeoning. Rearmament and other preparation for war predictably leads not only to mutual impoverishment, but to increased likelihood of military conflagration, yet it continues to escalate. Maniacal investment in bubbles like AI have repeatedly led to devastating crashes, yet the mania continues without either public or private control. The failure to unite against Trumpism demonstrates amnesia for the lesson of the rise of Hitler: the need for collective security among those under attack. Some capacity for social learning, however, seems to be re-emerging; a prime example is the realization by Europe, after extended fecklessness, that it was necessary to take a unified stand against US economic warfare and threats of military aggression against Greenland. Whether the world can relearn the broader lesson about the necessity for unified resistance to such aggression remains to be seen.

The folly factor

As the polycrisis deepens, the gap between rational self-interest and foolishness grows wider. For example, Trump’s illusion of restoring unilateral US global domination will only undermine remaining US power while provoking global catastrophe. As Monica Duffy Toft points out, the withering of cooperation to address common threats leads to “more flashpoints among nuclear-armed powers, more nuclear proliferation, less cooperation on global threats and a system structurally incapable of mitigating the risks it creates.”

While each of these dynamics is devastating in itself, their interaction is what makes the polycrisis appear so insoluble. In the next commentary in this series I will look at some of the outcomes of these dynamics and their interactions that have been projected. And I will propose a perspective on what might help lead us beyond the polycrisis.