For more than thirty years, Europe lived under the illusion that economic prosperity would eventually replace the balance of power. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, a large part of European elites considered that the opening of markets, commercial interdependence and globalization would gradually make conflicts obsolete. History had to give way to management, power to regulation, sovereignty to economic integration. This vision has deeply structured European policies since the 1990s. The European Union has become a formidable normative, legal and commercial machine, but it has gradually ceased to think in terms of power. While Brussels produced regulations, other powers continued to think in terms of empires, strategic dependencies and technological domination. The world has never stopped being brutal.
The brutal return of the global economic war
The 21st century does not mark the disappearance of power, but its return in new forms. Energy has become a geopolitical weapon. Critical raw materials serve as leverage. Global supply chains are now instruments of coercion. Financial sanctions, semiconductors, submarine cables, digital data or port infrastructure have become territories of strategic confrontation. The global economic war has already been here for more than a decade. It no longer takes place only on traditional military fronts, but in banks, digital networks, ports, health systems, energy infrastructures and now in algorithms.
There war in Ukrainethe tensions in the Strait of HormuzSino-American rivalries over semiconductors or cyberattacks against critical infrastructure tell exactly the same story: States now seek to control the vulnerabilities of their adversaries. However, the European Union too often continues to respond to systemic crises with administrative logic. It has perfected the culture of regulation while abandoning that of power. This is probably the major strategic error of the last thirty years.
Because the real world now functions as a totally interconnected system where an energy crisis can cause massive inflation, fuel social tensions, weaken governments and destabilize entire democracies. A cyberattack can paralyze an economy in a matter of hours. A logistical disruption can cause shortages within weeks. A pandemic can simultaneously disrupt production, public finances and national cohesion. The great return of conflicts does not necessarily mean the return of large-scale conventional wars. Above all, it means that all vulnerabilities now become exploitable.
The most underestimated subject of the coming years probably remains that of the insurance war. Behind every modern crisis there is now a central question: who really absorbs the risk? For decades, Western economies operated on an implicit idea: everything could be insured, compensated or shared. But this logic is starting to break down. States are over-indebted. Insurance companies are already reducing certain coverage in the face of the explosion of climate, cybernetic and geopolitical risks. Certain infrastructures, certain territories or certain activities gradually become too risky to be covered normally.
A vulnerable economy
This shift is major. An economy incapable of ensuring its strategic infrastructures, its energy flows or its digital networks becomes a vulnerable economy. And a vulnerable society always ends up becoming politically unstable. The next global shock may be neither banking nor military. It could be insurance. Because if the hedging systems gradually cease to function, the entire Western economic architecture enters a zone of turbulence. However, the European Union continues to think separately about questions of security, climate, health, technology or the economy, even though these crises are now completely intertwined. This intellectual fragmentation becomes dangerous in a world where everything connects, spreads and accelerates.
Perhaps the most worrying thing is elsewhere: some of the European elites still continue to consider the very notion of power as suspect, almost incompatible with modern democracy. This reading has become profoundly wrong. The world that will emerge in the next thirty years will not be dominated by the most virtuous societies, but by those capable of anticipating crises, protecting their strategic interests and controlling their vulnerabilities. This is precisely where artificial intelligence will become decisive.
AI will not just be a technological gadget or a new economic tool. It will become a central instrument of sovereignty. It will make it possible to anticipate logistical disruptions, detect weak signals, model hybrid crises, protect critical infrastructures or identify vulnerabilities before they become uncontrollable. States capable of mastering these technologies will have a colossal strategic advantage. The others will suffer.
Meanwhile, the French political debate remains largely a prisoner of the short term, of electoral cycles and ideological clashes that often become secondary to the upheavals of the real world. As the 2027 presidential election approaches, the central question should be clear: how does France intend to protect its economic, energy, technological and democratic sovereignty for the next fifty years in a world that has once again become conflicted? Without power, there will be no lasting social protection, no democratic stability, no strategic independence.
France still has considerable assets: its nuclear deterrent, its army, its defense industry, its energy model, its diplomatic capacity and its geography. But these assets will no longer be enough without a profound intellectual rupture. We will have to relearn how to think about the long term, resilience, sovereignty and power. Not out of nostalgia for the past, but because the world that comes will protect neither weak nations nor naive democracies.
