Robert Muggah is a co-founder of the Igarapé Institute and the SecDev Group and a senior adviser to the United Nations. Misha Glenny is a British journalist and currently serves as rector of the Institute for Human Sciences.
The rise in doomscrolling is a morbid sign of the times. The obsessive consumption of negative news isn’t just bad for physical and mental health, but our very survival. Recent studies confirm that overexposure to social media short-circuits the brain’s natural self-defences, leaving us disoriented and depressed. It turns out that optimism is good for us. People fortified by an optimist mindset are less prone to conspiracy theories and are generally happier, healthier and live longer.
Yet there are reasons why optimism is in short supply. Widespread screen addiction is partly to blame for headline anxiety, especially among young people. Another reason the algorithms are winning is because the world is objectively more volatile today than at any time since the Second World War. While Armageddon briefly loomed into view during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, today’s memes about nuclear, pandemic and climate apocalypse are unnerving because the risks are real.
The age of polycrisis offers no sanctuary to optimists. Polycrises occur when disparate shocks interact such that their overall impact exceeds the sum of each part. From the corridors of the United Nations to elite gatherings in Davos, the descriptions of our current predicament are increasingly less subtle. Otherwise sober diplomats and scholars now routinely end conversations with the sentence, “We’re doomed.”
So just how bad is it?
Citing the threat from Russia, the new Prime Minister of Poland, Donald Tusk, contends that Europe is already in a “prewar era.” The journalist Jim Sciutto describes the current moment as “Cold War 2.0″ while the geographer Parag Khanna likens it to neo-medievalism. The historian Niall Ferguson recently suggested that a Third World War was plausible. Wars in Europe, the Middle East and potentially East Asia are intersecting; experts disagree on the specifics, but most concur that the risks of catastrophic conflict are escalating.
As more nuclear powers become embroiled in real wars, the risks of a nuclear confrontation are rising. At least two “hot” conflicts could trigger a tactical or strategic nuclear exchange and a third serious dispute has the potential to start a global war. With Russian President Vladimir Putin ramping up the nuclear rhetoric, the war between Russia and Ukraine could spread to neighbouring European countries. The conflict between Israel and Gaza could engulf the wider Middle East, drawing in the United States and its allies. Meanwhile, an attack by China on Taiwan would almost certainly draw a response from the U.S., launching a massive conflict costing the global economy somewhere in the order of US$10-trillion and profoundly disrupting global trade.
And these are hardly the world’s only hot spots. Another flashpoint to watch is on the Korean peninsula, where North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong Un, is accelerating military readiness. Tensions are also simmering between India and Pakistan, India and China, and across sub-Saharan Africa, where civil wars are increasingly internationalized. By one estimate, there were as many as 183 regional, national and local conflicts in 2023, the highest number in more than 30 years.
Polycrises are proliferating because the global order is undergoing a wrenching transition. The world is shifting from a unipolar world briefly dominated by the U.S. to a multipolar system where power is more distributed across states, companies and other non-state actors. In terms of spending, the U.S. remains by far the dominant military power, but slowly, political, economic and technological power is shifting eastward, namely to Asia. There is no consensus about which system is more or less likely to generate stable outcomes. But there is agreement that the transition between systems can be intensely destabilizing.
Western countries played a leading role in shaping the fate of the world for the past half-millennium, including laying the foundations of a liberal order that dominated since 1945. Now, as the U.S. and Western Europe’s grip on power slips, other players are looking to fill the emerging vacuum. As the Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci observed when the world was undergoing another transition in the early 20th century: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born: in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms emerge.”
The relationship between the U.S. and China will be decisive in determining what Gramsci’s new world order looks like when it finally emerges from the womb of history. The two countries are locked in battle not just for geographical but also technological supremacy. The prize is dominance in artificial intelligence. Both China and the U.S. are convinced, not unreasonably, that technological leadership will play a decisive role in determining who sets the global rules of the game. And not without good reason: AI could add more than US$15-trillion to the global economy by 2030.
Despite their entangled economies, the U.S. is doing all it can to maintain an edge over China. It is supporting Taiwan, and in particular the Taiwanese Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), which produces 90 per cent of all advanced microchips. The U.S. recently blocked major chip manufacturers such as Nvidia from selling products to China and is supporting TSMC to build chip fabrication plants in Arizona, Japan and, soon, Dresden, Germany. The strategy is clear: Should China attempt to retake Taiwan in the next few years, the U.S. will maintain its superiority in microchips.
China has responded to U.S. sanctions with export restrictions of its own, as well as directing massive subsidies to its own national champions such as Huawei. China is also imposing restrictions on the flow of critical minerals, including rare earths. The country processes roughly three-quarters of the critical minerals required by all countries to achieve the green transition, not to mention all the high-tech circuitry for drones, missiles and fighter jets needed to fight proliferating wars.
The wider transition from a unipolar to a multipolar system is generating tremendous volatility beyond China-U.S. relations. The war in Ukraine has at least temporarily strengthened alliances such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), owing to shared concerns with Russia. However, wars in Europe and the Middle East are hardening anti-Western positions in dozens of countries that make up the so-called Global South, many of which do not share Western priorities and have long clamoured for a more representative international system.
The global rules, norms and institutions designed in the mid-20th century to prevent military escalation are increasingly fragile, dysfunctional and irrelevant. The UN Security Council is paralyzed by division and there is limited co-operation to tackle current threats, much less emerging ones. With the world increasingly fragmented into a mosaic of regional clubs and shrinking islands of stability, expansionist-minded politicians, opportunistic warlords and intrepid criminals are stepping into the vacuum.
Facing the prospect of a world at war, many governments are preparing for military confrontation. The international community has entered a new arms race, made all the more unpredictable by the emergence of new weapons driven by advanced robotics and AI. And despite the proliferation of voluntary principles, there are no globally agreed guardrails on how this new generation of weaponry can be used or restrained. Meanwhile, U.S. security agencies are sounding the alarm that China, Russia, Iran and North Korea are “prepositioning” for conflict, both online and off.
Global defence spending grew by more than 9 per cent last year, reaching a record US$2.2-trillion. For the first time since 2019, military expenditures increased in all major regions, including the Americas, Europe, Asia, the Middle East and Africa. The West is spending a combined 32 per cent more than it did when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014. And more than 30 per cent of government outlays are devoted to military expenditure in China and Russia. No surprise that nuclear powers are actively upgrading and modernizing their nuclear arsenals. As the Latin adage goes, si vis pacem, para bellum: If you want peace, prepare for war.
Making matters worse, grave global challenges are emerging at a time of deepening domestic stresses and fissures, including in the West. Democratic deficits have widened over the past two decades, a result of sharpening inequalities and polarization. Surveys of more than 150 countries suggest that levels of dissatisfaction with democracy are at their highest levels since the mid-1990s. Far-right populist influences are ascendant in France and Germany, and they have already been entrenched in Hungary and Slovakia. And in the U.S., the relentless degradation of democratic norms and institutions by extreme groups is undermining trust and confidence in democracy itself. Nearly half of all Americans fear their country could descend into internecine conflict within the next decade.
Domestic anxieties and social fractures are being ruthlessly exploited by rival powers, including in cyberspace. One way this is being pursued is through online disinformation and misinformation campaigns, whose objective is to sow confusion, doubt and polarization. Despite recent government and tech-industry efforts to regulate and moderate digital harms, the manipulation and spread of malicious synthetic content is already tearing at the fabric of societies everywhere.
With leaders and citizens distracted, meaningful co-operation on shared existential threats, from nuclear arms control to the green energy transition and AI regulation, goes unattended. The irony is that at precisely the moment the world needs to come together, it is spiralling apart. Trust, the currency of effective multilateralism, is in vanishingly short supply. The central question facing all of us in 2024 is how to foster global co-operation in an era of international competition.
At a minimum, this will require developing processes to align interests and incentives in such a way as they serve both people and the planet. It will demand new forms of multistakeholder partnerships between states, companies and non-profits. It also requires elevating geopolitics to the highest level of decision-making. Managing a shift to multipolarity that we all can survive and potentially thrive in will require a dramatic shift in mindset. One way we can navigate to a more rational and manageable future is by doing less doomscrolling, and instead shaping a more positive, optimistic future.