Why this political moment is shaped by overlapping security risks, a hardening scramble for strategic resources, and a world order breaking into competing blocs, corridors and bargaining tables.
The next decade opens under the shadow of several plausible wars. Analysts track active conflicts in Ukraine, Sudan, the Sahel, Myanmar and Gaza, and list additional flashpoints that could escalate, from the Red Sea and Gulf to the Taiwan Strait and the Korean peninsula. International Crisis Group’s 2026 conflict watch captures the breadth of this risk environment. Defence and risk assessments now routinely consider parallel crises: a deepening Middle East war that draws in Iran and regional powers; a grinding attritional conflict in Ukraine; and a medium-term risk of confrontation over Taiwan that would redraw security and trade patterns in the Indo-Pacific. This is no longer marginal scenario planning. It is the strategic weather in which governments, firms and movements—including the new right—make their calculations.
Scenarios for war over Taiwan are now a staple of military planning and policy debate. Chinese and US forces regularly model crisis situations; war-gaming exercises suggest that even a limited cross-strait conflict would disrupt global trade, finance and technology flows on a scale comparable to, or greater than, the shocks already seen from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. US Naval Institute scenario work shows how quickly escalation in the Taiwan Strait could reshape maritime and industrial security. Analysts tracking Chinese military activity argue that deterrence now operates under sustained pressure rather than episodic tension. The important point is not that war is inevitable in the near term. It is that the possibility alone is already reorganising supply chains, alliances and investment decisions.
The Middle East and its periphery illustrate a different pattern: overlapping proxy wars, non-state armed actors and direct strikes between regional powers, with periodic US and European involvement. Conflict monitoring groups warn that escalation there interacts directly with energy markets, maritime routes and migration corridors. A major regional war could absorb US attention and deterrent capacity in ways that invite opportunistic moves in other theatres. At the same time, Russia’s ongoing war against Ukraine continues to test NATO cohesion and European defence readiness and to tie up substantial Western resources. The result is a security environment where several major powers must plan for simultaneous crises rather than single-front contingencies.
What looks like disorder from afar often has a clear structure up close: energy routes, minerals, shipping lanes, arms build-ups, and states quietly pricing in a harder world.
Against this backdrop, Global military spending reached a record USD 2.63 trillion in 2025, marking a 2.5% real-terms increase from 2024, driven by rising tensions in Europe and the Middle East. The United States leads globally in spending, with nearly USD 1 trillion, followed by China and Russia, with the top spenders accounting for the vast majority of the total. Work on “the great fragmentation” argues that geopolitical risks now exceed levels seen during much of the Cold War, even as arms-control regimes and crisis-management mechanisms have weakened. The looming wars of this decade are therefore embedded in a broader architecture of competition: militarised technology races, cyber operations and coercive economic measures that rarely cross the threshold of declared conflict but steadily erode trust.
Running alongside this security picture is an intense race for critical minerals. The global energy transition, digitisation, defence industries and advanced manufacturing all depend on a narrow set of inputs—cobalt, lithium, nickel, copper, rare earth elements, graphite, manganese and platinum group metals—that are geographically concentrated and logistically complex. Industry and policy analyses project steep increases in demand for several of these minerals as electric vehicles, storage systems and energy infrastructure scale. The language of decarbonisation has therefore merged with the language of industrial strategy, strategic autonomy and supply-chain security.
Africa sits near the centre of this race. In 2025 the continent led global production of cobalt, copper, gold and platinum group metals, and countries such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Namibia, South Africa and Morocco have become central to current and prospective supply. Recent sector reviews show how central African production has become to the global energy transition. Competing investors from China, Europe, the United States and the Gulf are now positioning themselves across mines, processing plants and logistics corridors. The race is about more than minerals. It is also about who owns the infrastructure, who secures the offtake agreements, and who captures the downstream value.
The African Climate Foundation argues that increasing multipolarity gives African governments more leverage in principle, but also raises the risk that poorly coordinated deals reproduce older patterns of extraction with limited developmental impact. Its analysis of renewable-energy supply chains treats critical minerals as a geopolitical question as much as an industrial one. Scholars examining the race for critical minerals in Africa make a similar point: without clear conditions on local beneficiation, labour and environmental standards, infrastructure integration and technology transfer, new investments can deepen fiscal and ecological vulnerability rather than relieve it. The scramble contains both danger and bargaining space.
The security and extraction landscapes sit inside a larger story: the fragmentation of the international order. Analysts describe a shift from a Western-centred system towards a more fluid multipolar configuration in which several middle powers and regional coalitions wield significant influence. This does not mean the disappearance of US power. It means that no single actor can set the rules unilaterally, and that informal blocs, corridor projects and issue-based coalitions increasingly shape outcomes. Recent work on Africa in a multipolar world shows how this shift is already changing diplomatic strategy across the continent.
Several developments in 2025 crystallised this drift. Analysts point to Washington’s strategic retrenchment under the second Trump administration’s “America First” agenda, the strain in AU–EU relations, the first G20 summit held on African soil, and intensified competition over critical minerals and infrastructure in corridors like Lobito and the Horn of Africa. The same analysis notes how external actors use Africa+1 summitry to project influence while African states diversify partnerships and seek greater fiscal and diplomatic autonomy. Fragmentation is therefore not simply a breakdown. It is also a redistribution of bargaining possibilities.
Other work on the fractured order documents how rising military spending, sanctions, export controls and investment screening have woven geopolitics directly into trade, finance and technology flows. Energy markets are re-regionalising around security concerns. Digital infrastructures, from undersea cables to cloud data centres, are increasingly subject to national security reviews and localisation demands. The world economy now carries more explicit political wiring than it did a decade ago. Supply-chain policies in the United States, European Union and Asia combine decarbonisation goals with industrial hedging, and those choices reverberate through commodity producers far beyond the North Atlantic.
For Africa, this fractured landscape has at least three implications. First, it increases volatility: external wars, sanctions regimes and supply-chain reconfigurations can reverberate through commodity prices, remittances, tourism and financing costs with limited warning. Second, it enlarges room for manoeuvre: African governments can diversify partners and press for better terms on debt, infrastructure and resource contracts, provided they coordinate and avoid purely bilateral traps. Commentary on Africa’s strategic moment argues that the continent is no longer a passive arena for external competition but a pivot whose choices will influence how multipolarity stabilises. Third, it sharpens the importance of political judgement, because every partnership now carries embedded expectations on migration, votes, security cooperation, regulation and norms.
That is why looming wars, the extraction race and global fragmentation must be read together. They are not separate files in a diplomat’s cabinet. They form one strategic landscape in which security, minerals, infrastructure, finance and ideology increasingly travel as a package. This is the terrain on which the new right has gained confidence. It is also the terrain on which Africa will either continue to be bargained over or learn to bargain as a maker of the next order.
Understanding the New Right
- 1. Politics after the “Liberal Moment”
- 2. The global context: looming wars, extraction race, and fragmentation ← You are here
- 3. Anatomy of the new right: ideas and infrastructure
- 4. What the new right wants
- 5. Beyond the West: resonances in Asia and the global South
- 6. Interim reflection: why this project fits this moment
