As anticipated, 2024 has been a pivotal year, with over 50% of the world’s population selecting their leaders and shaping strategies for the years to come. Against the backdrop of geopolitical tensions, a latent financial crisis, and the risk of conflicts escalating to extremes (Ukraine, the Middle East, etc.), this year has ultimately brought three strategic shifts:

1. A Geopolitical Shift
   The BRICS bloc has definitively emerged as a new global power (1). With 4 new members and 9 additional partners welcomed in Kazan, this alliance now accounts for 45% of global GDP (in PPP terms) and 55% of the world’s population, compared to just 29% and 10% for the G7-led West
2. A Sociological Shift in the West
   United States has undergone a profound transformation in its socio-political landscape with Trump’s election. This marks a complete reconfiguration of the American zeitgeist—a shift that has been building since 2016 but has now fully materialized.
3. A Technological Shift
   Exponential innovation driven by artificial intelligence has accelerated dramatically. Generative AI is leading the way, while revolutionary advances in intelligent agents, robotics, and autonomous enterprises are reshaping the technological frontier.

These three shifts are reshaping geopolitical, sociological, and economic dynamics, forcing a rethinking of strategic priorities. More than ever, we are navigating a global transition crisis between:

• An old world—rooted in the post-1945 order, exhausted by globalization hurdles, financial excess, cultural decadence, and waning imperial ambitions.
• A new world—more multipolar, with redefined globalization, new players, and new technological frontiers.

The American Turning Point

The most striking development of 2024 has been the extraordinary reversal of the American socio-political divide. For the past 15 years, the U.S. has been mired in an imperialist trajectory fueled by alliances with globalist networks (notably European), color revolutions in targeted nations, and resource grabs in the Middle East under the Cebrowski doctrine (2).

Trump’s massive electoral victory marks a new pivot in American history, one that occurs roughly every 80 years. This shift is especially significant as it coincides with America’s secular crisis, marked by the impoverishment of the working class and an overproduction of elites—a phenomenon we’ve explored in previous posts, drawing on the work of Strauss-Howe and Turchin (3).

Fortunately, the shift has unfolded relatively peacefully, despite initial fears of civil unrest amplified by ideological polarization and assassination attempts on Trump. Risks remain, however, with factions of the old order tempted to make desperate moves and major regional players (like Turkey and Israel) exploiting the transitional chaos to advance their agendas, as we recently witnessed in Syria.

Populism Meets Big Tech: A New Alliance

This reversal is even more significant as it combines with a new dynamic: an unprecedented alliance between the new populists and Big Tech—represented by Elon Musk—and the rise of an accelerationist vision symbolized by NRX and the desire to upend the status quo (4). Trump’s provocative remarks about potentially annexing Canada and Greenland are a symbol of this new ambition.

In the 1990s, faced with the then-rising power of Japan, some doubted the United States’ ability to maintain its leadership. Ten years later, America had spectacularly regained the upper hand, defying all predictions through the digital revolution and its alliance with China.

Today, as many wonder whether the West is doomed to a slow but inevitable regression in the face of the BRICS’ rise, an American renewal might well reshuffle the deck.

Make no mistake, this renewal is not a democratic revival, even though it aligns with a new alliance with the U.S. popular classes. As the MAGA slogan attests, Trump and the movements supporting him are neither pure conservatives nor isolationists. Now more than ever, American imperial ambitions have not disappeared. They are simply evolving into a new form—regenerated and adapted to today’s world, its new challenges, and its new competitors.

Europe: The Great Uncertainty

In the face of this potential resurgence of the USA, one might question the future of Europe, which continues to be locked into its outdated globalist frameworks (uncontrolled immigration, ecological transition, suicidal bureaucracy...) and risks becoming the great continent adrift.

What remains for it in a multipolar world, caught between the Global South from which it has distanced itself and an America with renewed energy? Europe is marked by aging industries, an aging population, political paralysis, limited energy resources, and political networks primarily subservient to the old globalist elites.

As the situation dramatically worsens—with growing social fragmentation (highlighted by riots in England), worsening economic stagflation, and major elections approaching in Germany and possibly in France—what future remains for Europe? Is it destined for decline and slow death, authoritarian technocratic rigidity, or the risk of fragmentation?

Just as the Roman Empire's borderlands were the great losers of its decline, Europe’s prospects currently appear bleak. Particularly as America refocuses its energies on future-oriented regions—like the Indo-Pacific—while continuing to extract Europe’s remaining assets for its own re-industrialization, as it has done by pushing for the war in Ukraine and enacting the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).

The Road Ahead

If the specter of collapse now seems to be clearly receding in the U.S., the risk is greater than ever in Europe, which is not far from finding itself—an ironic twist of history—in the same state of technocratic stagnation that characterized the late Soviet Union.

As always, and as was the case with the USSR, decisive revival will not come from the people themselves but from rising elites, when they realize that change will be more profitable than maintaining the status quo. Let us hope this will be an opportunity for renewal, even if it will inevitably come with pain.

More than ever, we must prepare for a change of era, whose contours—the risks as well as the hopes—we will explore in the months to come.

The next post in this new "Future Frontlines: Navigating the Forces of Change" series will be published at the end of January, and will focus on analyzing the upcoming World Economic Forum's 2025 annual meeting. Click here to subscribe > 

_{(1)  Even though the BRICS are merely a loose alliance of convenience, with numerous internal contradictions (e.g., India vs. China), with many of its members (apart from the Russo-Chinese axis) having no intention of outright opposing the US and the G7, but instead aiming to propose alternative institutions while aligning themselves with the UN— as demonstrated by the presence of its Secretary-General, António Guterres, in Kazan}

_{(2) Enacted in 2001, Admiral Cebrowski’s strategy sought to destabilize key Middle Eastern countries—such as Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Yemen—to prevent regional powers from challenging U.S. dominance. By fracturing centralized governments through military interventions, regime changes, and exploiting sectarian divides, it aimed to create chaos and ensure long-term U.S. geopolitical control over critical resources.}

_{(3) We detailed these strategic trends in our Global Transition Crisis series, notably the four-generation cycle—based on the Strauss-Howe theory—in our post Déjà Vu: Is Our Past Our Future? and the secular cycle—rooted in the work of Peter Turchin, whose Cliodynamics theory has accurately forecasted the current troubled decade since 2001—in our post History’s Formula: Is It Time for Psychohistory? Peter Turchin’s latest book, End Times, provides an enlightening analysis of the current state of the U.S., characterized by popular immiseration, elite overproduction, and the risks that lie ahead.}

_{(4) As is typical in such populist/globalist cleavage reversals, Trump’s victory was fueled by both the immiserated US working class—with support from many former Democratic voters and leaders like Tulsi Gabbard and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (while some Republicans, such as Dick Cheney, backed Harris)—and a new conservative/Big Tech alliance, merging traditionalist ideologies with radical, tech-driven visions rooted in the Neo-Reactionary (NRX) movement and accelerationism. Which of these conflicting factions will ultimately prevail remains uncertain, but it strongly confirms the trends highlighted in our 2060+ predictions about Big Tech’s rising power in the coming decades.}