By Vipul Tamhane
Looking back on 2025, history may not mark it as the moment upheaval began. Instead, it might be seen as when acknowledgment caught up with reality. By then, the familiar myths of the post–Cold War world had worn thin, not shattered overnight, but frayed past repair. Ideas like US supremacy, seamless European cohesion, or the unstoppable march of global markets? They weren’t disproven suddenly; they just stopped convincing anyone. Quietly, without ceremony, belief in them faded. What remained was less a breakdown than an admission: the ground had shifted years earlier. We merely refused to feel it until now.
Out of nowhere, early January saw Russia roll out the Oreshnik, a hypersonic platform waved like a flag right after Trump won the US vote. Not merely about speed or engineering, the move signaled something deeper: Ukraine was now playing by altered rules. Months passed. A truce emerged, shaped under Trump’s influence, though peace came at the cost of land ceded by Kyiv. What many called unshakable Western unity suddenly looked less rigid, flexing quietly where it once claimed never to bend.
Around the same time, Ukraine remained locked in struggle, though it wasn’t alone in defining 2025’s toll. Across the Middle East, tensions between Iran and Israel burst through years of indirect combat when Israeli forces hit key nuclear sites inside Iran come early summer. From afar, Houthi-launched projectiles out of Yemen added momentum, turning a simmering standoff into open volatility. As heads of the G7 met weeks later, little else claimed their focus; talks bent under the weight of rapid-fire escalation. Structures built for yesterday’s conflicts now faltered, visibly strained by emergencies piling up faster than responses could form.
A sudden flare-up above the Baltic Sea marked the tensest point. Mid-air, a NATO drone and a Russian interceptor clipped each other within minutes, digital strikes surged across borders. Power systems blinked off in Kaliningrad and parts of Finland. In underground command centers, officials weighed responses while clocks ticked through uncertainty. The idea of treating it as an armed attack gained ground - Article 5 was on the table, briefly. Cooler heads pulled things back. Still, what stayed visible beneath the surface was this: old rules bend fast when radar blips merge with data breaches, when who did what isn’t clear until too late.
April brought violence to Pahalgam, where militants took the lives of 25 Indians, civilians and forces alike, in Kashmir. That strike triggered Operation Sindoor, New Delhi’s sharp reply: missiles slicing across borders into both Pakistan and its controlled parts of Kashmir. What followed unfolded quietly on global front pages, yet carried immense weight, a four-day exchange of fire between two nations armed with nuclear capabilities. Through May, tension stood still in the air, thick enough to feel, while little was said elsewhere. Barely noticed, a spark had flared close to an unthinkably large blaze. A win was declared by India, yet peace teetered like glass under pressure. Beneath the surface, tension hums quietly; just one misstep could ignite what restraint barely contains.
In Africa’s Sahel, hunger spread like dust on wind, one drought followed another, then another, until food vanished. Power held by military regimes tightened further under the influence traced back to geopolitical players beyond the continent. Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso watched crops fail as rains never came; governance faltered just when people needed it most. Aid from Europe or North America? Turned away without discussion. Only shipments marked with Russian insignia or dispatched from Algiers were allowed through. Blame, meanwhile, pointed westward; colonial histories invoked while bellies stayed empty. Starvation became a tool, not an accident. Control grew stronger even as villages emptied. Strategy disguised as sovereignty shaped daily survival.
Quietly, it held. Facing the close of the year, French sway across its old domains had already faded, Moscow’s grip stepping quietly into place. Come December, JNIM, aligned with al-Qaeda, choked off fuel supplies to Mali’s main city; pressure built fast, threatening to unravel the ruling military group. A disturbing possibility loomed - the emergence of a regime under extremist control.
A shift trembled through tech landscapes, quieter than it seemed. On a date marked by history, i.e., Mao’s birthday, China introduced the J-36, a sixth-generation stealth aircraft, slipping into airspace once dominated by others. Symbolism hung heavier than payload. Then came something weightless yet disruptive, i.e., pixels mimicking aggression. A clip, never real, depicted Chinese forces storming a Philippine ship. It spread fast, widely believed, then unraveled. Truth arrived late, after perception had shifted. A tremor in Manila, matched by sharp resentment echoing from Beijing, suddenly, the waters near the Spratlys bristled with tension, American ships holding their breath. This was new territory, meaning conflicts stitched together not by policy or provocation, but by fabricated videos, deepfaked voices, illusions moving like truth across screens.
A fresh pattern in global economics emerged as old foundations wavered. Riyadh revealed that more than a third of its crude shipments to Beijing would shift to yuan, backed by gold convertibility through Shanghai markets. For decades, oil tied to dollars had anchored US financial reach - now that grip showed fractures. A broader alliance within BRICS+ introduced a shared accounting unit, easing transactions beyond the greenback without mimicking one. When penalties were threatened abroad, their impact dimmed, while other networks moved goods and capital just fine.
Power drifted quietly toward new conduits. Back at the helm, Trump deepened America’s withdrawal from shared international frameworks. Sharp import duties, sweeping reductions in taxation, along with an inward-looking economic stance, notably favoring domestic industries, lifted national output yet rattled diplomatic ties, and disrupted cross-border commerce. Europe stumbled through uncertainty, pulled by shifting US priorities and its own internal frailties. Amid the drift, France stepped forward with clearer direction than most, though this revealed less about French vigor and more about how much ground others had lost.
A slow grind defines certain wars. In Gaza, a truce - patchy and often broken- was held after US-led talks. Sudan’s battle lines kept shifting, pushing people from homes while the world looked elsewhere. The aftermath of Assad’s fall in Syria brought more fragmentation than order, shadowed by armed factions and strikes from above. Not the stories dominating 2025, yet each will ripple through the coming years.
A few moments stood out as quiet wins on the global stage. A lasting agreement was reached between Armenia and Azerbaijan, closing a long chapter of hostility centred on Nagorno-Karabakh. Meanwhile, across continents, India and Canada reestablished communication channels once strained by prolonged friction. Significant? Certainly. Yet each step forward seemed to highlight how rare such progress had become amid widening fractures elsewhere.
A shift took shape in 2025, not through one moment, but by steady pressure piling up over time. The old belief, rooted since ’89, that global currents naturally flowed toward unity, open governance, and US-backed stability, quietly faded out. Its successor? Still undefined. Instead of reliving past standoffs, the world edged into a fractured phase; multipolarity without script or symmetry, where nations, regionally sized, acted first, asked nothing of superpowers later.
By 2026, certain global tensions stand out. Not far below the surface, Taiwan continues to simmer - a spark away from escalation. Should a miscalculation occur or a symbolic move be made, conflict between Washington and Beijing might follow, dragging economies and militaries into uncharted turmoil. Separation in tech isn’t slowing; instead, it spreads quietly, nudging firms and nations toward divergent digital paths. Meanwhile, across Europe, unity appears less certain than before, as parties skeptical of Brussels gain traction in more than one key capital at once.
Famine looms where droughts gut staple crops - spiking prices, unraveling borders. When breadbaskets fail at once, unrest follows close behind. Governments wobble under pressure that few anticipated. Across the Sahel, breakdowns might pull in neighbors like Niger or Chad before dragging in outside forces almost unnoticed. Security doctrines strain, then snap, unable to adapt fast enough. Hunger doesn’t negotiate; it spreads.
The serious strategic domain of space will undoubtedly rise. The first actual competitions of space in 2026 that are not just symbolically Earth orbit-related might be due to such factors as the attempts at resource extraction on the Moon and the competing claims over cislunar territory. And, there will probably be on the horizon another cyber or AI incident that will reveal the weaknesses of the critical infrastructure, which the governments still have not properly dealt with.
The comfortable world of the post-Cold War came to an end long ago, but 2025 was the year we stopped acting as if it were not. The concern for 2026 and the following years is not whether we can bring back that old order; we can't, but whether we can create something secure enough to stop these disintegrating parts from setting off a catastrophe much worse than the one they could have produced by themselves. The initial feedback is not very promising.
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(Vipul Tamhane is a counter-terrorism expert and governance consultant)
