Trend The post-Cold War order enters a structural transition with 2025 as the turning point

Summary

The report argues that the system built after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet collapse is now changing at its foundations rather than being adjusted at the margins. It singles out 2025, the eightieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War, as the year when pressures that had accumulated piecemeal across many fields surfaced together. Five shifts are described as running at once: a fading liberal order, shrinking globalization, cracks in shared values, US-China rivalry and partial bloc formation amid US-China and US-Russia confrontation. No common agreement or even a concrete direction for a successor order has emerged, although the authors caution that the transition need not turn out badly. They nonetheless judge that the world has entered a next normal and expect 2025 to rank with 1919, 1945 and 1989 as a year that reshaped world order, with pressure reaching the Korean Peninsula.