Every few years, someone declares that the world is “more divided than ever.” Cute. The truth is far messier: global stability isn’t eroding naturally — it’s being pried apart by states, cartels, corporations, and algorithms that all learned the same trick at once. Welcome to the new age of distributed destabilization.
The West spent decades assuming threats would be obvious — tanks, missiles, coups, maybe the occasional missile-happy dictator looking for attention. Instead, we’ve entered a world where the most effective weapons are cheap, deniable, and sometimes even fully automated.
1. The Rise of the Micro-Player
The old model was simple: big nations bully small nations; small nations complain. Now? One guy with a laptop in Moldova can cripple a hospital network in Cleveland. A tiny extremist cell can radicalize thousands for the cost of a domain name and a propaganda template.
Power used to belong to states.
Now it belongs to whoever happens to have a GPU and insomnia.
2. The New Shadow Economies
The global black market isn’t a marketplace anymore — it’s a network. And networks scale.
Financial crime, drug markets, ransomware gangs, mercenary AIs scraping intel — every one of these systems now operates like a startup with a growth mindset. The West keeps trying to punch them like traditional enemies, but they’re not nations. They’re decentralized enterprises with customer service reps and holiday schedules.
These groups don’t want to conquer. They want to extract. Quietly. Constantly. Forever.
3. Borders Still Matter – But Not the Way You Think
Geographical borders are becoming more performative than protective. If you can destabilize London from Lagos, or swing Florida votes from St. Petersburg, physical distance means less than the ping to your target.
But borders do matter in a new way: they create jurisdictional blind spots. Western nations are constantly fighting enemies that simply step over a digital fence and become untouchable.
It’s like playing hide-and-seek with a toddler who’s figured out teleportation.
4. The Great Western Blind Spot
Let’s be honest: the West got slow. Not technologically — we’re still obsessively innovating — but philosophically. We keep securing yesterday’s vulnerabilities while today’s attackers automate tomorrow’s.
We hardened supply chains… right before they were infiltrated through firmware.
We strengthened election systems… while ignoring the cultural fault lines being widened online, and letting the elections themselves be swung by public opinion – opinion that’s being controlled by God knows who from God knows where.
We feared traditional militaries… and missed the rise of private ones.
The threat isn’t simply “out there.” It’s already woven into the infrastructure, disguised as convenience, efficiency, or economic opportunity.
5. The Real Threat Isn’t Conflict — It’s Friction
Most nations aren’t aiming for open war. They’ve figured out that subtle, continuous friction is cheaper and more effective.
- Slow down shipping containers by 24 hours.
- Spread rumors until markets twitch.
- Turn off a city’s power for two minutes.
- Leak a politician’s inbox at the exact wrong time.
- Seed fifty fake “local community groups” run by bots.
War isn’t declared anymore — it’s subscribed to.
6. What the West Must Do (Preferably Yesterday)
If Western nations want to stay competitive, they need to adapt to this fractured landscape fast:
- Build resilience, not illusions of control.
- Break the dependency chains that give rival powers leverage.
- Stop assuming the adversary plays by the same moral rulebook.
- Invest in distributed defense the same way attackers invest in distributed offense.
- Accept that deterrence no longer works if your enemy doesn’t need a flag.
The countries that thrive will be the ones that treat threats like ecosystems — not events.
The World Isn’t Ending. It’s Evolving.
This isn’t doom and gloom. It’s a wake-up call. Power is shifting, not disappearing. Threats are multiplying, but so are tools of defense. The nations ready to adapt will shape the next century.
The ones that don’t?
Well… they’ll spend that century writing strongly worded diplomatic letters while someone’s botnet steals their lunch money.
A western white father. I am unapologetic about my German and Irish heritage, and I fully understand that we, and people who look like us, built the West.