The world’s power structures are undergoing their most profound transformation since the end of the Cold War. From the laboratories developing artificial intelligence to the missile ranges testing hypersonic weapons, a new kind of competition is emerging, one that threatens to make traditional notions of security, diplomacy, and national strength obsolete.
At the center of this transformation lies a stark reality: the old rules no longer apply. As European geo-political expert General Pasquale Preziosa warns, “Those who do not decide will be decided by others.” This isn’t merely a diplomatic platitude. It’s becoming the defining principle of 21st-century geopolitics.
The Hypersonic Revolution: When Minutes Matter
The most immediate game-changer is the hypersonic missile. Traveling at five to eight times the speed of sound, roughly 12,000 kilometers per hour, these weapons fundamentally alter the nuclear balance that has kept the peace for decades. Unlike traditional ballistic missiles that follow predictable arcs, hypersonics can maneuver unpredictably at unprecedented speeds, rendering existing defense systems largely useless.
For Europe, this represents an existential challenge. With minimal anti-missile defenses, the continent finds itself particularly vulnerable to these weapons, especially when armed with nuclear warheads. Even the United States, long confident in its defensive capabilities, now finds itself playing catch-up in a race it once led.
The implications extend beyond military strategy. When decision-makers have mere minutes instead of hours to respond to incoming threats, the space for human judgment and human error shrinks dramatically. This compression of time may force nations to rely increasingly on automated systems, introducing new risks of technological failure or cyber manipulation at the most critical moments.
Beyond Earth: The New Battlefronts
Modern conflict has expanded far beyond traditional land, sea, and air domains. Space itself has become an active theater of operations, where “atypical warfare” unfolds daily through signal jamming, cyber attacks on satellites, and covert missions by major powers. Control of space-based assets increasingly determines a nation’s ability to communicate, navigate, and gather intelligence.
Similarly, the cyber domain has evolved from a supporting capability to a primary vector of national power. Yet here, Europe finds itself in a particularly precarious position. Despite its regulatory leadership through frameworks like GDPR, the continent lacks major indigenous technology champions, leaving it dependent on American companies for critical digital infrastructure while being vulnerable to Chinese technological penetration.
The AI Arms Race: Chips as Weapons
Perhaps no competition better illustrates the new nature of power than the race for artificial intelligence supremacy. China’s 15th Five-Year Plan, covering 2026-2030, sets an audacious goal: global leadership in AI by 2030. This isn’t merely about economic growth—it represents a fundamental rewiring of national power around what Beijing calls “new quality productive forces.”
The Chinese approach treats every advanced semiconductor as a strategic asset, viewing technological dominance as the key to controlling future warfare, finance, medicine, and society itself. This perspective transforms global supply chains into instruments of geopolitical competition, where control over chip architectures becomes as important as control over traditional military assets.
The contrast with Western approaches is stark. While American innovation remains largely decentralized and market-driven, China’s model emphasizes vertical control and national mobilization. This creates a systemic competition between different models of organizing technological development, one that will likely determine which approach proves more effective at harnessing AI’s transformative potential.
The Second Nuclear Age
Compounding these technological shifts is what Paul Bracken has labelled the Second Nuclear Age. Unlike the bilateral competition of the Cold War, this new race involves multiple players with different doctrines, capabilities, and risk tolerances.
Russia under Vladimir Putin has departed dramatically from the cooperation that marked previous decades, investing heavily in modernizing its nuclear forces with advanced hypersonic missiles and new intercontinental ballistic systems. Most troubling is Moscow’s adoption of a “limited first use” nuclear doctrine, the dangerous belief that nuclear conflicts can be contained through the use of smaller, tactical weapons.
Meanwhile, China is rapidly building toward strategic parity with the United States, developing advanced ballistic missiles with multiple warheads and deepening military cooperation with Russia. For the first time since the Cuban Missile Crisis, the United States faces the prospect of nuclear competition on two fronts simultaneously.
The American response, the “third strategic offset” launched in 2014, attempts to maintain technological superiority through AI, robotics, and hypersonic weapons. However, this strategy faces significant obstacles as rival powers make their own advances in precisely these areas, potentially rendering current defense systems obsolete.
Europe’s Moment of Truth
Against this backdrop of global transformation, Europe faces perhaps its most consequential strategic choice since World War II. The continent can no longer rely on others to guarantee its security or define its role in the world order.
Three paths lie ahead. The first involves adaptation without fundamental change, maintaining current structures while accepting a secondary role in global affairs. This path risks leaving Europe burdened by internal divisions and unable to achieve genuine strategic autonomy.
The second option requires systematic revision of how European nations cooperate, prioritizing common defense and empowering EU institutions to act as a unified geopolitical player. This would represent a profound shift from the current system of national sovereignty to genuine European integration in security matters.
The most ambitious path envisions a radical transformation of the European project itself—evolution toward a true federation with centralized control over foreign policy, defense, and security. This “United States of Europe” would compete directly with America, China, and Russia as a global superpower.
The stakes of this choice extend beyond Europe itself. As General Preziosa emphasizes, “rearmament without a common political direction is not deterrence, it is dispersion.” Increased defense spending by individual European nations, without coordination, risks creating internal divisions rather than external strength.
The Diplomatic Deficit
These military and technological changes unfold against the backdrop of diplomacy’s apparent decline. The war in Ukraine represents not just a military conflict but the culmination of two decades of eroding multilateralism. Traditional quiet diplomacy has given way to unilateral decisions, media-driven foreign policy, and personalized leadership styles that prioritize publicity over patient negotiation.
This shift has profound implications for conflict resolution. War increasingly appears to function as a systemic instrument, a tool that justifies economic hardship and military spending in democracies while helping autocracies consolidate control at home. When conflict becomes structurally useful to political elites, the incentives for peaceful resolution diminish accordingly.
The Regional Ripple Effects
The transformation of global power dynamics creates opportunities and challenges far beyond the primary competitors. South Asia provides a compelling example of how these shifts play out regionally. American policy inconsistency has created space for other powers to assert influence. Russia re-engaging as India’s military partner, China leveraging water control through massive dam projects, and Turkey pursuing neo-Ottoman ambitions through ties with Pakistan.
These regional realignments illustrate a broader trend: the decline of American hegemony creates opportunities for middle powers to pursue more independent strategies but also increases the potential for miscalculation and conflict as traditional alliance structures weaken.
The Human Factor in an Automated Age
Perhaps the most unsettling aspect of these developments is how they compress human decision-making time while expanding the potential consequences of those decisions. When hypersonic weapons can reach their targets in minutes, when AI systems process information faster than human operators can comprehend, and when cyber attacks can unfold in milliseconds, the space for careful deliberation shrinks dramatically.
This acceleration of conflict timelines, combined with the integration of AI into military command systems, raises profound questions about maintaining human control over life-and-death decisions. Algorithms, however sophisticated, can misinterpret ambiguous situations and remain vulnerable to cyber manipulation, risks that multiply when reaction times are measured in minutes rather than hours.
The Power of Choice
The thread connecting all these developments is the fundamental importance of decisive action in the face of rapid change. Whether addressing hypersonic threats, AI competition, nuclear modernization, or regional realignments, the luxury of gradual adaptation no longer exists.
For Europe, this means confronting uncomfortable truths about dependence and vulnerability while making hard choices about integration and sovereignty. For other powers, it means navigating an increasingly complex landscape where traditional metrics of strength matter less than technological capabilities and adaptive capacity.
The question facing leaders and citizens alike is whether humanity can develop institutions and norms capable of managing these new forms of power before they overwhelm existing systems of governance and security. The alternative, a world where speed trumps wisdom, where technological capability matters more than human judgment, and where the failure to decide quickly means having decisions imposed by others represents a future that serves no one’s long-term interests.
As we stand at this crossroads, the choices made in the coming years will likely determine whether the emerging global order enhances human security and prosperity or ushers in an era of unprecedented instability and conflict. The power to shape that future remains, for now, in human hands—but the window for exercising that power may be narrowing faster than we realize.
Editorial Note:
A video which explains the major concepts in the report can be seen below:
The report can be found here:
Evolving Geopolitics: The Perspective of Pasquale Preziosa
A podcast discussing the report can be found here:
