T.K. Arun
Global interdependence withstands Trump, joins climate change, geopolitical, technology and societal shifts
A remarkable feature of the world in the wake of President Trump’s assault on the global trading and security system is the resilience of global interdependence. Beggar-thy-neighbour retaliation has been strikingly absent. What other macro trends would a satellite view reveal? We spot eight more.
Climate change is one. It is warming the oceans, melting polar ice, pushing up sea levels and submerging small islands, accelerating wind speeds and filling up clouds with phenomenal quantities of water that pour down on hapless towns, river basins, crops, and mountainsides, destroying towns and creating floods, mudslides and landslides, and eroding coastlines. It causes droughts and wildfires.
Prolonged droughts dry up pasture, herdsmen range far afield with their herds, encroach on settled lands and trigger conflict. Insufficient rains pit upper and lower riparian states against one another. Heatwaves desiccate towns, worsen water shortages and sanitation. Air-conditioner makers might cheer, but rising temperatures sap productivity, and shorten lifespans, spawn new vector-borne diseases.
Agroclimatic conditions change. Crops cease to suit their traditional regions and have to find new ones. Food insecurity, livelihood loss and rising commodity prices mark the transition. Missing rains make air pollution worse. Acidic oceans endanger marine life, add to the loss of biodiversity.
Shifting Geopolitics is another large trend. Pax Americana lies buried in the wreckage of the old world order. The world has multiple poles of power. Now that Trump has knocked down Europe’s American crutches, Europe finds it can walk on its own, almost. Russia continues to be a centre of global power. China is, of course, the most consequential power after the US. America’s orphaned East Asian allies, Japan and South Korea, bury their bitter past and build a new alliance on top. Turkey craves a Turkic sphere of influence, spanning the Central Asian Stans and itself. India stands non- or multi-aligned. A big rise in defence spending accompanies this shift.
Interpenetrating technological changes form another trend. Artificial Intelligence makes the most noise, and it feeds into and augments other changes. One comprises slectrification of most energy, electronification of the grid to maintain stability as it absorbs energy from diverse, often intermittent, sources and sees load-shifting charging of batteries, renewable and nuclear energy, and novel ways to transmit power, including by microwave.
The creation of new materials — metal-organic frameworks and covalent organic frameworks, for example — and finding new uses, including as catalysts, for old materials, prove vital. Synthetic diamonds and whisky that can be aged as desired in a jiffy disrupt traditional industries.
Advances in biotechnology yield new drugs, synthesize ethylene from atmospheric CO2, and revolutionise all of production. Google DeepMind’s AlphaFold 2 has forecast the shapes of 220 million proteins, making for exciting new discoveries.
Genetic engineering and stem cell technology pave the way for lab-grown human organs and curing congenital diseases. Ethical and regulatory challenges rise alongside.
China leads in 57 of the 64 technologies that make for strategic dominance, as per the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. The US leads in seven. Countries without domestic supplies of R&D talent open up global capability centres in India, taking care not to employ flighty IIT grads.
Financial technology is disrupting traditional payments and currencies, particularly on the blockchain.
Technological and associated economic change far outpaces society’s ability to adapt. Alienation, religious intolerance and revanchism take hold. Global interdependence brings people of diverse cultures in close contact. It is not always fraternity that results. Violent rejection of change and a desperate search for presumed authenticity trigger schism and conflict. This is evident across the world, including in India. When those who pioneer change neglect those left behind, these elites turn into objects of rejection and hate.
This, in turn, contributes to the loss of trust in experts and expertise, feeding disinformation. The rise of social media and a curtailed role for professional journalists in curating and mediating information accelerates the trend. Algorithms corral people into disparate information bubbles, shielding people from facts and opinions that contradict their prejudice. Democracy suffers from the deficit of a shared universe of public discourse.
The rise in women’s labour force participation and shifts in technology and social mores that widen women’s choice combine to create changes in demography. Earning women with a sense of self-worth reject patriarchal subjugation. Men fail to adapt, expect wives to do the heavy lifting in domestic chores and caring for the young and the old. Women rebel by refusing to get married.
The number of children a woman can be expected to have, the total fertility rate, has dipped to 0.7 in South Korea, and stay significantly below the population replacement level of 2.1 in rich nations. More countries will see shrinking populations, as in Japan and China.
A corollary has been the rise of singlehood. In the US, 41% of women and 50% of men in the age band 25-34 were single in 2023, as against 25% 50 years ago, says the Economist. Largish numbers of men blame their involuntary celibacy on women, liberals and disruption of tradition, reinforcing alienation and xenophobia.
Back to sober terra firma.
TK Arun is a Senior Journalist and Columnist based in Delhi.
The article was first published in the The Sanjaya Report as The mega-trends shaping the world on 12th November, 2025.
Disclaimer: All views expressed in the article belong solely to the author and not necessarily to the organisation.
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Acknowledgment: This article was posted by Swati, a Research Intern at IMPRI.
