By Gustavo de Arístegui, as published by La Razón, 15 February, 2026
Violence has become less restrained and more willing to ignore legal and moral limits, while societies seem to be getting used to living with war.
If we were to take a geopolitical look at 2025, the verdict would be devastating: the world has spent twelve months fueling the powder keg with the most flammable elements of the human arsenal—entrenched wars, mediocre leadership, and growing impunity for violence. Barring a miracle, 2026 will be the year that
ignites this toxic mix into one or more geostrategic cataclysms of global proportions. What is unsettling is not only the number of active conflicts—between 100 and 130 wars, insurgencies, and civil conflicts, the highest figure since 1945—but also the feeling that current leaders are, in far too many cases, far below the standard that the circumstances demand.
The era of political pygmies
The world has had the misfortune of being saddled with political leaders who oscillate between bloodthirsty fanaticism and geopolitical myopia, but there have always been great statesmen who rose to the occasion. Today, on the contrary, we have the most impoverished political class of the last 80 years , managing structural crises with tactics of perpetual election campaigning, prioritizing tomorrow’s headlines over the consequences of the next decade. Not since the end of World War II has there been such an obscene gap between the gravity of the challenges and the alarming incompetence of a large part of the Western leadership. If the great James Freeman Clark (the true author of the phrase about the difference between a statesman and a politician…) were to rise from the dead, he would die all over again.
The West’s accumulated mistakes—in the Middle East and in its erratic handling of the highly complex relationships with China and Russia—have catalyzed the rapprochement, still partial but extraordinarily worrying, between Beijing and Moscow . If nothing changes in the coming years, they could move from a marriage of convenience to a solid alliance between Russia , a wounded revisionist power, and China, which aspires to rewrite the rules of the global game. Moscow brings a willingness to take risks, energy resources, and military experience; Beijing adds industrial muscle, financing, diplomatic cover, and a growing and formidable military power.
China: the real adversary, a disturbing giant
Beijing is no longer a “demographic giant without economic muscle,” but an expanding military and technological power that has entered a decisive phase of its historical projection.
China faces some dark clouds on its horizon: a structural economic slowdown, a chronic real estate crisis, and demographic implosion (the accelerated aging of its population), but it remains the only power capable of challenging the United States for global primacy. Its military capabilities are already extraordinary in conventional, nuclear, naval, space, and hypersonic warfare. China launches as many warships each year as the entire French navy and has exponentially increased its investments in anti-ship missiles, area air defense, and electronic warfare, expressly designed to block access for US forces in the Western Pacific.
Beijing’s strategy for 2026 goes beyond the military; it is a battle for control of the central nerves of the future economy :
- The monopoly on critical materials: China has consolidated a suffocating control over rare earth elements—nearly 80% of global production and, more importantly, 90% of refining—in addition to dominating the supply chain for gallium, germanium, and graphite. These materials are the lifeblood of modern electronics, advanced defense, and the energy transition. Beijing no longer hesitates to use export licenses as a geopolitical weapon.
- The geography of power: Its obsession with controlling the “bottlenecks” of global trade is evident. From the Strait of Malacca—its Achilles’ heel—to the Taiwan Strait, Bab el-Mandeb, and the Panama Canal. Added to this are the new Arctic routes it is developing in close collaboration with Russia (“The Polar Silk Road”) and the construction of artificial islands in the South China Sea, which have transformed reefs into veritable unsinkable, static aircraft carriers.
- The technological war: 2026 will witness an acceleration in the race for supremacy in artificial intelligence and semiconductors. Despite Western restrictions, China is mobilizing massive state resources to achieve self-sufficiency in advanced chips, understanding that whoever wins the race in quantum computing and AI will dominate the warfare of the future.
Tensions with its neighbors are multiplying: the Philippines, Vietnam, Australia, and Japan live in daily contact with the pressure of the “gray zone”—the use of maritime militias, aggressive coast guards, and cyberattacks. But the red flag remains Taiwan. As 2027 approaches—the date identified by Western intelligence as the moment when Xi Jinping will demand his military be ready for an invasion —the risk of a naval blockade or quarantine of the island is more plausible than a direct amphibious invasion. China conducted complex air and naval exercises in the final days of 2025 simulating a total blockade of Taiwan. Do we need any more clues?
Beyond Asia, China’s foreign policy has intensified in the so-called “Global South.” In Latin America and Africa, it combines massive investment, debt diplomacy, and the installation of dual-use (civil-military) infrastructure, such as deep-water ports and other strategic facilities, consolidating a sphere of influence that seeks to displace traditional Western powers.
Ukraine: the war in slow motion
In Ukraine, 2026 is being heralded as the year of the “slow-motion” war: few changes to the lines on the map, but a constant intensity of attacks against critical infrastructure, cities, and energy hubs. Moscow is betting on exhausting Kyiv’s resilience and, above all, the patience of Western public opinion. The Russian strategy has mutated: it no longer seeks a lightning victory, but rather to turn Ukraine into a functionally failed state, incapable of integrating into the EU or NATO.
The most frequently cited scenarios point to possible partial truces, intermittent negotiations, and frozen lines of contact, rather than a definitive peace. The risk of spillover into other NATO countries stems not so much from a deliberate decision to invade a Baltic state or Moldova tomorrow (though that cannot be ruled out) but from the accumulation of hybrid incidents: sabotage of submarine cables, interference with the GPS system in the Baltic, and massive disinformation campaigns designed to fracture allied unity.
Gaza: The moral paradox of the West
Gaza remains an extraordinarily complex paradox and an open wound in the global conscience. On the one hand, there are the undeniable moral imperatives of guaranteeing the right to exist of the State of Israel and its legitimate self-defense against terrorism. On the other, there is the human tragedy that the war has wrought. However difficult the balance may be, it is essential to guarantee the first objective without making Gazans doubly victimized: by the mafia-like terrorist organization Hamas, which uses them as human shields and oppresses and brutalizes them daily, and by the devastating effects of the war.
The West Bank, meanwhile, is dangerously sliding toward chronic violence due to settlement expansion and the progressive erosion of the Palestinian Authority. It cannot be forgotten that the longer the current limbo lasts, the greater the resentment among Palestinians and the rest of the Arab world will be, and the more serious the risk of Iran regaining influence through its proxies in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen.
The deepest fracture, however, occurs on the level of legitimacy: Western discourse on international law loses credibility every day that different metrics are applied to different victims. This “double standard” is the most potent fuel for anti-Western narratives, from the Sahel, undoubtedly the epicenter of jihadist violence on the planet—as we have extensively analyzed in these pages—to Southeast Asia.
United States: Trump’s “tough prudence”
Donald Trump’s second presidency has accelerated an uncomfortable and profound transformation of the United States’ role. His National Security Strategy concentrates resources on a few vital interests —avoiding a major direct war, containing costs, and realigning trade alliances—and demands that Europeans and Asians finally assume responsibility for their own defense. The document contains some glaring errors, such as considering jihadist terrorism a regional risk, something that events disprove daily. Jihadist terrorism extends its reach from the West through the Sahel and Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia, the South, and the rest of Asia. It is a very serious global threat, not a regional one.
Washington’s foreign policy now combines prudent restraint with blunt rhetoric. It is a transactional diplomacy that puts a price on almost everything—from military bases to the nuclear umbrella—and weakens multilateral defense mechanisms, potentially emboldening its adversaries.
The burning peripheries and the diffuse war
Africa remains the continent with the most active and ongoing conflicts. The belt of instability stretching from Sudan and the Sahel to the Horn of Africa is an explosive cocktail of coups, jihadism, and competition for resources among external powers (Russia, China, Turkey, and the West). In Latin America, the concern is no longer interstate warfare, but rather the militarization of public security and the consolidation of gray areas where organized crime exercises de facto sovereignty, almost always with significant transnational ties.
But beyond the visible fronts, 2026 will be the year of diffuse warfare. Critical infrastructure—underwater data cables, power grids, financial systems, satellites—are increasingly vulnerable targets. A successful cyberattack can now paralyze an entire country, disrupt global supply chains, and destabilize governments without firing a single shot. The line between peace and war has been digitally erased.
The cost of inaction
The world enters 2026 with too many fires half-extinguished, a limited number of firefighters, and an exhausted public opinion. The danger is no longer just “the great war” we all fear, but the sum of medium-sized conflicts, humanitarian crises, and geoeconomic shocks that erode democracies and normalize barbarity.
It is not about resigning ourselves to managing the fire, but about deciding whether we accept living in a world where war is routine or whether, for the first time in a long time, we begin to treat it as what it should be: an intolerable anomaly and tragedy.