If an international analyst would have been sent to sleep at the end of the Cold War, and awakened in 2024, his vocation would have been put to a matchless test: he would either be fascinated by the amount and quality of the changes experienced by the world in these three decades, or he would stand motionless, discouraged at such complexity.

Our newcomer-to-2024 analyst could sum up the world before his eyes with a few words: disorder, insecurity, uncertainty. If in the toughies the fashionable term was “globalization”, today the terms that prevail are “decoupling”, “geoeconomic fragmentation”, or, directly, “postglobalization”.

Promising disarmament treaties have given place to tensions all over the world with a variety of new actors in an open global competition. Even classical conflicts resurface where frontiers and territories, ethnicity and religion are at stake, from Ukraine to Gaza, from the Sahel to the Caucasus.

This insecurity has multiple causes, also fed by commercial and technological disputes that seemed contained and now fragment the economy, which since the Covid-19 pandemic have turned into a priority of national security.

A scandalous concentration of wealth, besides, increases the unease of vast social sectors deprived of welfare, awakening an antiglobalization wave, shaking the foundations of liberal democracy, and forcing massive and traumatic migrations that generate xenophobia.

To crown it all, we experience the human frailty exposed by the pandemic (in the middle of the AI age), and witness a planet deaf to the alarm cries of scientists about climate change.