by
Austin BayJanuary 2, 2025
In January 2022, I wrote my first formal annual Strategic Challenges column -- a quick assessment of what I called "strategic challenges to the post-World War II international order." That column listed four Strategic Challenges (big problems). 2023's essay listed five. 2024's added a sixth.
About a month after I wrote the 2022 column, I realized "international order" was not only wonk lingo but misleading. As I wrote in 2023, when it comes to geopolitics, the trick word in the term "international order" is order.
Change is a constant. New sources of energy and new technologies may or may not lead to a perceived positive end like more food production (leading to less starvation) and cleaner air and water (a key to better human health). Digital communication via satellites and fiber cable can benefit trade, finance and diplomatic understanding. It can also give criminal hackers access to personal bank accounts and give a military enemy a digital line of attack to destroy America's electrical grid.
Changes (of any stripe) can seed disorder and even anarchy in political systems and therefore roil international political relations. That frustrates coordinated solutions to big problems.
To paraphrase the poet Petrarch's summary of the enemies of peace: human fear, avarice, anger, pride and ambition frustrate solutions. After WWII, major powers attempted to appease, buy off, ignore, suppress or -- particularly in the case of the Soviet Union -- exacerbate and leverage regional and global problems to achieve their own goals.
The saddest fact: The big problems are so pervasive, complex and entwined, they are at best mitigated, navigated or reduced.
2025's strategic challenges, not necessarily in rank order:
Challenge 1: Wars employing nuclear and/or biological weapons that kill hundreds of thousands, if not millions. These weapons could be used by major powers (e.g., China, U.S.), radical regimes (Iran), terrorist proxies (Hezbollah?), or terrorist organizations and criminal gangs. Enhanced biological weapons could kill billions. Iran, Vladimir Putin's Kremlin and North Korea's Kim regime routinely threaten to wage nuclear war. Communist China is rapidly expanding its strategic nuclear arsenal. We have already witnessed the global economic and social havoc of the Wuhan Flu (COVID-19). The megalomaniacal see these weapons as the way to kill with history-changing, lethal surprise.
Challenge 2: The threat of a devastating "close-in attack" within a nation's own political border (or just offshore). The close attacks target key infrastructure and people. Could use nuclear or bioweapons, but drones with conventional munitions, hackers, saboteurs and traitors can use digital, manual and explosive means to disrupt civil and military communications; damage transportation, energy and security infrastructure; and manipulate media. Israel's Grim Beeper pager-bomb attack on Hezbollah's terrorist leaders demonstrated long-range, pinpoint digital warfare is a fact.
Challenge 3: Big Debt. In the U.S., 2022's hyperinflation and government budget excess exacerbated Washington's debt problem. Now inflation is embedded in all U.S. economic action, to include military preparedness. In fact, Washington's structural debt is the biggest self-inflicted threat the U.S. faces. Big Debt, however, is a global sickness. Communist China's property bust erased several trillion dollars' worth of individual wealth. Now Big Debt haunts Beijing. The Chinese people feel cheated.
Challenge 4: Flailing states, failed states and fake states plagued by anarchic violence that spills beyond political boundaries. (Note: Flailing states may maintain a central government but cannot control their own territory. They often suffer from civil war -- Sudan, for example. They are a step from failure and collapse -- like the Congo. In fake states, a powerful clique or gang controls the capital, the United Nations seat, the banks and little else.)
In 2024, I noted similarities between flailing state violent spillover and America's unpoliced southern border. Mexico is a borderline flailing state (pun intended). Mass illegal immigration, human trafficking and drug smuggling turned California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas into a hybrid-war front line.
Challenge 5: Perhaps the fundamental Big Problem. The pervasive corruption of influential but venal individuals (leaders?) and venal institutions in all nations and tribes. Since they undermine the Rule of Law, they are particularly damaging in democracies. Their corruption is so internally corrosive in all nations, but particularly democracies, that timely and effective political and military response to Challenges 1 through 4 is systemically delayed, undermined or immobilized.
To defeat Big Debt takes character and work. I think Petrarch would agree.