Looking back on my recent posts, I’ve realised that my lens has been focused towards domestic issues. With that, I wanted to take a step back and have a more high-level look at the state of the world at the start of 2026.
How often have we heard the same narrative that the world is more unstable now than since before 1945? The facts are there for us to see, with more than 60 different nations engaged in armed conflicts in 2024, the highest number since the end of World War II. That pattern has continued into 2025 and 2026 and it doesn’t take long to find an infographic online which dictates this.
It’s obvious that the state of the world is very unstable right now, but what I think is more interesting is the growing contradiction that works in unison to this.
The mess of the world order looks to have caused politics to pull inwards, whilst our economies, technological advances and global crises are pulling outward. Governments are obsessed with self-reliance while depending on others more than ever before.
This I think will be a defining factor for how global affairs could play out this year. In 2026, no nation can fully disengage itself from global systems without paying a price.
Interdependence Isn’t Going Away
Think about how deeply interconnected the modern world is. Global supply chains span dozens of countries and data, technology and infrastructure all link governments and corporations alike. The continued push into AI shows this where each of its building blocks and ways of operating are inherently international, whilst nations all look to integrate it into their own domestic strategies.
We’re seeing nations look to opt out of globalisation whilst wanting to keep all of the benefits. This doesn’t work.
Look at the US as an example. It spent more on Halloween candy as a nation in 2025 than it did on humanitarian aid. Trump is determined to pull away from global affairs and only work to his priorities of 19th/20th Century style isolationism. However, this cannot work for a population that’s used to a globalised world.
The results of immigration crackdowns and tariffs have led to both mass labour shortages and rising consumer prices. The Pandora’s Box of globalisation has been opened, bringing with it cheaper prices and an increasingly consumerist nature. Populations can’t go back to how it was before.
Trump wants to pull away from the world but instead has found himself stuck moving between the role of global peacemaker and lashing out in foreign territories to create an inconsistent vision of what “America First” really means.
Global Violence and the Great Aid Recession
When we look at global conflict, the numbers are pretty bleak. 2024 was the most violent year since 1946 and it doesn’t seem like we’re reaching the peak of the curve yet.
Wars are getting longer and harder to resolve whilst increasingly involving outside actors. In most of these cases, civilians bear the brunt either as being displaced as refugees or being victims of violence.
The UNHCR’s Global Trends Report shows that by mid-2025, over 122 million people had been displaced by conflict and persecution. While this conflict spreads, the mechanisms designed to manage this instability are weakening. Multilateralism, and the idea that states address shared problems together, is under strain. It seems that political will is drying up and nations are both tired and fed up of their post-war responsibilities to put out fires.
At the same time as global conflict grows, the humanitarian status quo has frayed.
The Council on Foreign Relations named 2025 as the year of the “Great Aid Recession”. The consequences of this are already showing. For example, in Nigeria cuts to aid have pushed hunger to its worst point in a decade. The United Nations World Food Programme warns that millions are at risk without fresh funding. In Sudan, civil war rages on, creating one of the worst humanitarian crises on Earth, with tens of millions needing assistance.
Here in the UK, our favourite three words are fast becoming “stop the boats”. When you realise that around 60% of the refugees residing in Calais hail from Sudan, it’s clear that aims to shut our borders and ignore what’s going on can’t work in our globalised world. If we want to resolve some of the biggest ongoing refugee crises, we need to engage in the global order rather than step back and wait for someone else to fix it.
The global disconnect of more need and less aid is a feature of the same contradiction driving global politics. Governments want to shrink international engagement even as modern world issues almost always have a cross border effect.
Zooming in on Europe
Looking at Europe as a whole offers a clear illustration of this contradiction in action.
In the post-Cold War period, many European governments assumed the worst of interstate war was behind them. Security was outsourced to the United States and economic integration was predominantly unquestioned to make peace feel less like something to be maintained and more like second nature.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine exposed how fragile those assumptions were. The return of industrial warfare brought with it energy insecurity, disrupted supply chains, inflation and deep political division. This resurfaced the reality that peace is neither automatic nor is it self-sustaining.
Russia’s invasion came at a time when Europe appeared weak and divided, with several countries questioning the value of the European project itself.
As some governments looked to pull away from the bloc, the conflict exposed how deeply dependent they were on shared systems and global conditions. Energy security, supply chains, inflation, and food prices were shaped less by national choices and more by forces moving across borders.
Far from proving that states could stand alone, the war revealed how little room there was for meaningful isolation.
We Are All Entangled
I think the central illusion that will continue in 2026 is that a country can pick and choose when to be global and when to be local. It’s clear that in the modern world, this is actually impossible.
Migration policies affect labour markets and cutting foreign assistance affects stability abroad. We are all interconnected through a range of supply chains where any disruptions can affect prices at home. We’re more closely tied than ever and there’s no easy way out of this system, especially when populations are reluctant to let go of the benefits of globalisation.
Interdependence is a gravitational force and nations can’t avoid its pull. We’ve become too used to the cheapness and ease of globalisation and aren’t able to deal with everything that comes with it. The UK wants to have less migration, yet still expects an Uber Eats delivery to their doors every weekend.
Where This Leaves Us
Considering this narrative, I think 2026 will continue the trend of a world stuck in managed disorder.
Conflict will continue and become increasingly challenging to resolve as global systems weaken. Humanitarian issues will deepen as funding shrinks. Nations will continue to see their neighbours less as allies and more as competitors. I don’t think we’ll see states move away from the rhetoric of autonomy, but nor will they be able to avoid the deeply connected global systems that are in place.
So far, every attempt to turn inward has exposed dependence rather than eliminated it. Do we want tighter borders? Then expect labour shortages. Shall we spend less on global aid? Then expect instability and refugee crises to grow.
Nations need to accept that interdependence brings an obligation as well as benefits. The idea of someone else fixing the problem won’t work.
The great contradiction we have in 2026 is that we’re trying to behave as if we can all stand on our own two feet, yet we’ve built a system where we all need to lean on each other.
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