Thoughts on New World Order(s)

On models of the future

In a conference the Centre organised some time ago, participants discussed the notion of lostalgia, or a sense of nostalgia for a future that we were promised but never received. Throughout the twentieth century, many societies lived inside what historian Reinhart Koselleck called a widening “horizon of expectation”, the notion that the future would be radically different from the past. There was an expectation of what progress looked like: flying cars, miracle medicines, colonies on the moon, people living on Mars. A world where science and technology created a rational order and solved all our problems. These futures still shape our imagination and our hope for what is possible.

Today, time seems stuck. Our models for understanding the world fail to adapt to new shapes of old forces, much less absorb the potentially transformative events we experience. We have trouble generating new futures that don’t involve flying cars and colonies on the Moon. In what writer and cultural theorist Mark Fisher terms the “slow cancellation of the future”, we see culture looping back on history — Fisher said living in the 21st century is to “have twentieth-century culture on high-definition screens”. So goes our thinking on the international order. The faster we can get ourselves out of this headspace, the better prepared we will be for the inevitable strategic surprise coming down the pike. The chaos sown by the Trump Administration has an upside, because it creates space for reimagining what is possible, where there was no space before.

Systems are defined by purpose. They’re not just component parts in a box. Systems analyst and environmental scientist Donella Meadows defined a system as “an interconnected set of elements that is coherently organised in a way that achieves something”. If we consider this definition, an international system only exists and is visible because it is animated by a coherent purpose. This animating purpose highlights what elements — the actors, behaviours, constraints — are salient to our analysis, and drives the relationships between them. The current international system is made up of multiple overlapping orders, which structure the relationships between those who consent to be governed by those orders. The logic of the overarching system, broadly speaking, thankfully remains the mostly open, largely predictable, and relatively rule-bound order that has facilitated Singapore’s growth and development over the last sixty years.

On dislocations

What seems to be happening is that the international system has not adjusted its rules, norms, and relationships quickly enough to cope with the disruptions we have experienced in the first quarter of the 21st century. Perhaps the only way to speed up the adaptation might be a crisis, but that would be a drastic and abrupt shift. What forces have we failed to adapt to?

First, fairly predictable changes in global demography. We say demographics is destiny, but there is a layer of state action or policy response that can change the impact of demographic transition on a society — whether it is rapid ageing, or turning a youth bulge into a democratic dividend. Beyond sheer numbers, there are other shifts of note, produced by societal change, that are understudied. Differentiated outcomes for girls and boys, and particularly of girls outperforming boys in school, grow out of and have longer-term repercussions for family formation, and constituencies for the predictable social hierarchies and norms that have governed how we run our societies. Climate change is another factor constantly changing the calculation of shared interests and reordering priorities between states.

The critical failure seems to be our inability to manage technologies that have both breadth and depth of impact diffusing across our economies and societies. One of the surest effects of new technologies is to change the nature of inequality, both within and between economies. Each industrial revolution has been accompanied by social upheaval, in some cases societal revolution. A cluster of such 21C technologies — artificial intelligence, electrification, bio-engineering — could dramatically change the balance of power between states, and thus affect their ability and willingness to cooperate. General-purpose technologies like AI have a long-tail and increasingly transformative impact, which we may be completely failing to imagine.

If we look across at how nation states are responding to these dislocating forces, we see four pendulum swings:

• From integration to fragmentation;

• From mutual trust to transactional relationships;

• From just-in-time efficiency and optimisation to resilience and self-reliance; and

• From valorising transparency to valuing strategic opacity and ambiguity.

In response to these shifts, the international system of the next decade may not be animated by a positive goal — a shared vision of the good life — but a negative one — a shared fear of systemic failure. In a risk-averse world, aims are less ambitious, narrower and shorter-term. However actors may therefore be more effective at solving their problems when those ambitions are limited.

To do well in this world, we must develop three critical capabilities. To my mind, the most important capability is the ability to prioritize and make trade-offs in an increasingly complex environment. Decision-making in the 21C resembles multivariable calculus or solving a 7x7 Rubik’s Cube — leaders must simultaneously solve for multiple factors, while recognising that every move they make to align factors will misalign others. Doing this well also demands a clear-eyed understanding of how systems actually function, rather than how they were meant to function; we must be able to separate hope from analysis. In a complex world, cognitive capability becomes a strategic resource — actors that can handle complexity, and manage seemingly-unresolvable tensions will have decisive advantage in a world where cognitive coherence is no longer a thing.

The next is the ability to deal deliberately with interdependence. We have now seen quite clearly how interdependence has upsides and downsides. Selective interdependence — where actors deliberately choose how much and with whom they are vulnerable — is the smart strategy. Actors will want to balance self-reliance and resilience with efficiency, and also to consider how to weaponise not only their adversary’s but their own vulnerabilities. Finally, as every democratic society has demonstrated over the last decade, the ability to persuade and build trust is a fundamental enabler for all policy change we want to make in the world.

On regional orders

What does this look like from the vantage point of Southeast Asia? ASEAN member states had a combined GDP of about $3.9 trillion in 2024, making ASEAN the 5th largest economy globally, contributing approximate 3.5% of total global output. But can you really think of the region as a single unit of analysis? Great variability across the 11 member states presents some challenges to a unified response.

Trade & investment figures show the region’s geostrategic dilemmas: while the largest share is intra-ASEAN trade, the US remains the region’s largest source of final demand with China close behind. The region’s largest source of imports is China, which overtook intra-ASEAN trade in 2022. However, the US remains by far the largest source of inward FDI, followed by intra-ASEAN investment.

At the same time the forces highlighted above have driven varied responses from member states. Technology diffusion across the region is extremely patchy, with highly variable adoption rates of emerging tech. Mainland and maritime SEA face different climate-induced challenges, including flooding, drought, food and energy security, and climate-induced population displacement. Energy security — via a regional grid and accelerated electrification — is one of the few areas members can work together on, and yet progress remains slow. Demographics does not present a rosy picture either: the region is ageing, albeit slowly. The proportion of those aged 65 and over increased from 5.4% in 2005 to 8.2% in 2024. Singapore and Thailand are the most aged populations with the lowest TFR, while Cambodia, Laos, the Philippines & Timor-Leste remain youthful. Malaysia and Vietnam TFR has declined below replacement.

A recurring theme in regional geopolitics is that a balance of power in the region is desirable, because it creates more room for strategic autonomy. Broader involvement in the region also makes it easier for Southeast Asian states to cooperate, with a larger bucket of shared interests and challenges to manage. But if you layer in the rapid diffusion of digital technologies, how much do these assumptions, built on the bedrock of physical geography, remain true? Another way of looking at the question of the next great power war is to say that it is already here. The average citizen just doesn’t see or recognise it, because it manifests entirely in the digital domain, through cyber and information operations, designed to disarm, cripple, and drain the resources of the adversary. Rather than Ebola, the new regional order will have chronic flu.

Another question is what counts as shared prosperity, or shared infrastructure. In the future states could think differently about redistribution. Instead of returning taxes (which our poorest citizens don’t pay) or putting money directly into bank accounts, governments could give an AI companion to every citizen, and a robot to every household. Children would have personalised tutors; in a region where fertility has fallen such that in many places cohort sizes have shrunk, this would maximise human capital potential. Adults would have assistants to turbo-boost their productivity at work. Robots in the home could raise female labour force participation rates. Technology diffusion could in the shorter run close inequality and development gaps between and within economies. But for this to work, the region would need to sort out physical infrastructure challenges like a reliable power grid and electrification — who is most likely to help us do this? Which takes us back to geopolitics. One possibility is that the US’ allies in the region step up. Japan, already the extra-regional player most trusted by Southeast Asian states, the largest source of Official Development Assistance, and the second largest investor in the region, could for instance support the regional grid buildout. This would reduce the regional critical dependencies directly on either major power, providing a palatable third option for regional economies that are most comfortable not picking a side.

To close, I would argue that these dislocations and increasing uncertainty in the international system are prompting competing models for what constitutes progress and success: what does it mean to be modern? What does it mean to be a society — what holds peoples together and what constitutes a social contract in the 21st century? Who gets to participate in these models, and is participation still defined by the same factors (ethnicity, nationality, class) as before? In this model, what generates legitimacy and for whom? Looking at the range of answers to these differing conceptions of progress, I would suggest that we will remain in a overlapping, messy, complex international system for some time to come.

Jeanette Kwek was Head at the Centre for Strategic Futures.

The views expressed in this blog are those of the authors and do not reflect the official position of the Centre for Strategic Futures or any agency of the Government of Singapore.