Making sense of geopolitics in 2025

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Monica Toft, Professor and Director, Center for Strategic Studies; Academic Dean, Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University, USA: Appreciate that you can't drive history and that you can only control what you can do but then the other side just might surprise you.

Robin Pomeroy, host, Radio Davos: Welcome to Radio Davos, the podcast from the World Economic Forum that looks at the biggest challenges and how we might solve them.

This week - war and peace and international relations - can a greater understanding of history help us end and avoid wars? And what is the future for geopolitics? On this episode we hear from three experts.

Monica Toft: History doesn't repeat, it rhymes. So if you have a pretty good sense of history, you'll make better decisions. You'll have a better understanding of the dynamics at play.

Robin Pomeroy: In 2025, are we living in a safer or a more dangerous world? This India-based expert says this about a potential return to nuclear proliferation.

Happymon Jacob, Founder and Director, Council for Strategic and Defense Research (CSDR): This has been the most opportune time in post-World War Two history for nuclear aspirants to perhaps try their luck in developing nuclear weapons.

Robin Pomeroy: And what is the future of multilateralism when it comes to peacemaking? Ever heard of 'minilateralism'?

Happymon Jacob: Despite the failure of multilateralism, there is a recognition among states in various parts of the world that we need to invest in minilateralism and that we need to, as groups of countries in the region, come together and try and resolve the region's problems.

Robin Pomeroy: And will the rise of minilateralism be an opportunity for the countries of the global South?

Aparna Bharadwaj: You know how in a toughly contested election the swing states become very important? What we are seeing is Global South are the swing states of the world right now, because they want to work across the multipolar lines. And so that's why they're more confident and that's why they have a bigger voice right now.

Robin Pomeroy: Follow Radio Davos wherever you get podcasts, or visit wef.ch/podcasts where you will also find our sister programmes, Meet the Leader - one-on-one interviews with some of the most thoughtful and influential people - and Agenda Dialogues, the full audio from the best discussions at World Economic Forum meetings.

I’m Robin Pomeroy at the World Economic Forum, and with this look at war and peace…

Monica Toft: It's chess. It's a chess game.

Robin Pomeroy: This is Radio Davos

Welcome to Radio Davos. On this episode we meet three very different experts on geopolitics.

I met all of them at the World Economic Forum’s Summer Davos in China. So these interviews happened before the deal to end the war in Gaza. In fact, as if to illustrate the rapidly changing state of international affairs, at the time, the big story in geopolitics was Israel’s bombing of Iran, happening as I recorded all three of these interviews.

Later in the show Aparna Bharadwaj, a Senior Partner at the Boston Consulting Group, tells us how she helps businesses make sense of the complexities of geopolitics.

We’ll also hear from Happymon Jacob, Founder and Director of the Council for Strategic and Defense Research (CSDR) in India, he has interesting things to says on nuclear proliferation and on ‘minilateralism'.

But first, I speak to Monica Toft, Professor and Director of the Center for Strategic Studies at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University in the United States. She writes a lot about wars, particularly civil wars, and I stared by asking Monica Toft why humans have and always have had wars.

Monica Toft: Monica Duffy Toft, I'm the academic dean and professor of international politics at the Fletcher School at Tufts University. I'm a scholar of international politics and I focus on war and large-scale political violence.

Robin Pomeroy: Why do we even have wars?

Monica Toft: Why do we have wars? You know, it's a funny question you asked that.

So when I started graduate school, it was the 1990s, and people asked me, why am I studying war? We thought it was going to be the decade of peace, love, and dope, right? That the war of peace was breaking out, it was end of the Cold War, and they were legalising marijuana in parts of the country, not all. And I just thought, no, I don't think war is going anywhere.

And in fact, if you had looked and thought about the 1990s, what we saw was an outbreak of civil wars. So large scale great power war did seem to be diminished, the threat of it. We really didn't have it during the Cold War because of course we had the nuclear balance.

But what you saw was the outbreak of civil wars and in particularly in Europe. So former Yugoslavia started having tensions in the late 1980s and then in the early 1990s and then war broke out between Croatia, Bosnia and Serbia and then later of course in Kosovo and Serbia.

So why do we have wars? We have them for a variety of reasons. Like humans are basically, we don't like to think about it, but we're animals. We're territorial. And more often than not, wars are about territory, right? And why about territory? Because territory allows for the survival of the species. It allows for reproduction. It allow for us to produce food. It allows us to determine who is an enemy and an opponent who can enter that territory. It's also status, right? If you have and control valuable pieces of property or land, that's also a status.

So there's a variety of different reasons why humans still fight wars. And I think that we're going to continue to fight wars well into the existence, unless we put ourselves out of existence through war itself. And of course, we're all nervous about nuclear war. That's the one that perhaps potentially we could even destroy the planet.

Robin Pomeroy: It's not a new thing, war, it goes back since the beginning of human civilisation. Is war still the same thing now as it was 100 years ago or tens of thousands of years ago?

Monica Toft: Aspects of war are still the same as they were since humans formed social communities that needed protection from one another.

And what is still the the same is emotion. Arm-to-arm combat, we still have limbs, and when it comes down to that last six feet, unfortunately, if you're an infantry person.

So there's aspects of war, the defence, the amassing of power with other people, strategy, your tactics and how you're going to actually prosecute the war and organise your societies around that war.

What's changed is technology. Killing power is a lot greater today so you can mow down entire societies. We see this. Air power, we didn't have air power even 200 years ago. We had naval power, navies have been around, land forces have been around. And now we have space, and there's a big debate within the field among policymakers about cyber and digital. Is that war, or is it just sort of operations that are on the brink of war, but because they don't have the same destructive capacity, they're disruptive, but they may not be destructive in the same way, and they don't necessarily lead to the direct killing of fellow humans? There's a debate about whether cyber actually is part of the war sort of playbook.

Robin Pomeroy: I'm surprised to hear that is even a debate. It strikes me that cyber warfare, obviously there's other kinds of cyber attacks that isn't war, but proper cyber warfare which can knock out whole systems, hospitals, military facilities.

Monica Toft: This goes back to your question about what's changed. And one of the things that's again being debated is what is the nature of war really about the objective?

And in the old days, it was about sending shrapnel metal through bodies to stop oxygen going to the brain. That really is what killing and war is about, is that you want more of them on the other side to be killed than on your side or wounded.

Where cyber is different is that you don't have metal flying through the air. What you have is digits, right, zeros and ones that can still be really disruptive. Yes, if you shut down an electrical grid right now, the East Coast of the United States, there's a heat wave, right? There's heat domes. And if you shutdown air conditioning units and electrical grids or even just hospitals, people will die.

But because it's not the same kind of kinetic, violent physical, right? Some people want to say that, no, it doesn't qualify at the same level as the same kind of warfare.

So the point being that war has changed over time. But the basic premise of me trying to kill and disrupt more of the other guy's personnel and assets than they do of mine, that's what you're trying to do in warfare. And that is still the same.

Robin Pomeroy: You wrote a book called Civil Wars, A Short Introduction. And as you just mentioned, there was a lot of civil wars broke out kind of at the end of the Cold War. I guess, is that a change of the status quo? And therefore, if there's another change of status quo right now, we can expect to see more civil wars break out?

Monica Toft: I guess I should start with the Cold War. What was happening was there was a tempering, there was kind of a blanket on large-scale violence and discord within states.

When the Cold war ended, some wars ended because they were proxy wars that were being fought between the United States and the Soviet Union. So it was communism versus capitalism.

El Salvador is a case. That that war kept going because the United States was siding with one side and the Soviet Union was siting the other. When this Cold War ended, we got a peace to that war.

The problem is, is that when communism fell out of favour, there was a contestation of ideas and people about who should govern the state.

Interestingly, the Soviet Union actually broke up fairly peacefully. There were pockets of violence, Chechnya, Georgia, Moldova. But other parts of the Warsaw Pact space, and I've already mentioned Yugoslavia once, there was a big debate about what kind of governance structure should be in those countries. Another one is Turkmenistan, right, which faced a bad civil war.

So what happened was a contestation of ideas and different opposition groups forming, and in some cases they came to blows and you had an outbreak of civil war in a number of countries.

And you didn't have the fear of nuclear holocaust and that balancing, recalibrating of power across the globe by the Soviet Union and the United States. So you ended up having civil societies coming to blows with their governments or the governments predating on them. And you had the emergence of large scale violence in a number of countries and or genocide.

I mean, let's not forget also about Rwanda and genocide, which actually came on the heels of a civil war in that country as well. In the 1990s, yes, we lost the fear of large-scale interstate wars, but we did see a good number of civil wars emerge.

And that sort of died down, though, as we moved into the 2000s. And then here we are today in the 2020s. And we're seeing a combination of the continuation of civil wars and then, of course, the reemergence of interstate wars.

Robin Pomeroy: You characterise the breakup of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact as there were discussions about how to be governed, but also ethnicity, isn't there, must have played a huge part certainly in the Balkans, in Rwanda, nationalism, language, that kind of national identity.

Monica Toft: This comes back to the notion of ideas, right? So which ideas should be preeminent? So communism or should be religion?

So we had a number of wars emerge. And in fact, in Tajikistan, it was a question of whether it was going to be an Islamically driven state.

And then in former Yugoslavia, it was more complicated because you had a combination of ethnicity. You had Croats, Serbs, and Bosnians who also happened to ally across different religious denominations. So the Serbs are Orthodox. Croats are Catholics and Bosnians are Muslims. And the idea was how central should religion be? And then did religious actors side or not side with their given communities? Did they try to bring peace?

I mean, one of the nice things that I outline in the book that most people are unaware was that many religious communities and leaders tried to keep the peace.

We think about religion as a violent force, especially after 9/11. But actually, if you look at cases of civil war mediation, it's often religious actors that are there at the forefront saying, enough, we don't want any more killing and bloodletting.

So absolutely, nationalism emerged or reemerged its ugly head, religious ideas reemerge. And by the way, communism was kept alive in Nepal, right, as a casus belli in that country.

So, it was a whole combination, but that dampening of the Cold War rivalry, that balance of power, once that was lifted, then you did start seeing these antipathies, these historical memories about fearing other groups within a state if one of them was going to emerge more dominant and potentially enact a shared history that was quite violent from the past. There was a lot of fear there.

We talk about spiral models and security and fear that a group was not going to be able to thrive if the old political order was no longer placing a check on the system to keep them safe.

Robin Pomeroy: I've read some of your writing talking about that, that says some of those stories, some of those traumas can be way back in the past as well, maybe 100, 200 years ago. Remember when they did that to us, we better not let that happen again.

Monica Toft: Yes, absolutely. And that's what nationalism is about.

Nationalism is about sort of the origin story of what a nation is. And tragically for the human condition, oftentimes that origin story is based on who they defeated or who defeated them.

We can go back to Kosovo and the Blackbird field. The Serbs trace it back to a defeat under the Ottomans who they tracked to the of our Albanians.

So those narratives, those histories, those stories are really important, the origin stories for these nations. And unfortunately, leaders, elites will prey upon those stories in order to divide the electorate, in order to get power.

And this is what you see happening time and time again, that you've got an aggrieved party and then they prey upon and they say, you know who's responsible for that? That group X. And do you remember what they did to us hundreds of years ago?

And one of the most interesting and tragic stories and pieces of evidence when I was writing my actually dissertation at the University of Chicago was an Abkhazia, which is a republic of Georgia. And the Abkhas are an independent people separate from the Georgian population. And The Abkhas were willing to concede that the Georgians had been there for hundreds of year, but not 400 years, right? They said, we'll give you 300 years, but we're not going to give you 400 years.

And so that origin story, how far you go back, who was there first, is really, really important. And it keeps playing out time and time again between these groups, even though the groups change, but there's this firm sense of what the group is through time.

And then with each unfortunate crisis, as crises unfold, those narratives are reinvigorated, new facts are added to them, or their sense of the facts are add to them. And then they become alive again, and they become a reason by which the groups are mobilised and they justify attacking and killing the other side.

Robin Pomeroy: So we've mentioned that when there's a big shift in the power balance or maybe an empire breaks up, if you want to see the Soviet Union, something like that, that can lead to a breakout of various civil wars. Also if a country is invaded, in recent history we've seen Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, famously in the minds, certainly of those of us in the West, that in subsequent years, after that invasion, it wasn't a blossoming of some kind of democracy or any other kind of stability. It was really nasty civil war. Can you maybe explain what lessons we can draw from that, why and what we may see in other similar situations in the future?

Monica Toft: Yeah, so unfortunately violence begets violence and memories are long, which is why as a scholar, as somebody who informs the policy community, you want to stop the violence before it happens.

Because once it happens, then you have brothers, husbands, wives, daughters killed, and people want to avenge that, right? They want to seek revenge.

And it takes a really long time for those memories to die down. You know, it can take generations. This is why you need outsiders to come in. And basically, it's like children on a playground keep the parties apart. And what you hope is that with enough time that those memories dissipate, interdependence economically, maybe socially, maybe marriages, they'll deepen enough to preclude this sort of fear should the power structures weaken at some point again in the future where violence will reemerge.

But you can look around the world, we could turn to Cyprus. There's peacekeepers there to keep Turkey and Greece at bay, even though that war, the last time the war was fought in the 1970s.

So again, the memories are very long. And one of the reasons why civil wars are so difficult to resolve, and it's different than interstate wars, is that the combatants have to coexist. They have to continue to live with one another in the same state, make compromises, unless, there's two conditions, outsiders are there and they stay there. The Balkans, right? The Westerners were supposed to be there for a year. That war ended in 2005, right, so here we are 20 years later. You still have peacekeepers there. And so it takes a very, very long time, and by the way, people are worried that violence is going to re-erupt there even today. That's one way.

The second way is through partition. When I started our conversation, it's about territory. It's about control, what languages you get to speak, what kind of education your children are going to get, and sometimes all you can do is separate the countries apart.

This is what happened in Sudan, where we had Sudan proper, and then now we have South Sudan. East Timor, new state, because the sense was that was the only way that we were going to possibly get peace.

We didn't get full peace in Sudan between the north and the south, in part because the territorial division between the two countries was never finalised. East Timor seems okay at this point.

So it's very difficult and it's different than interstate wars because you have to co-exist and form a government and form sort of the basis of the economics and again the cultural life of the society and if one side's going to dominate and say no we're not going to speak that language or teach that language then the other side is going to become fearful they're afraid that there no longer is a nation going to be able to exist and reproduce right again back to the thing and they may take up arms and reorganise.

Robin Pomeroy: You may have already mentioned a couple of them, but are there examples of where that kind of reconciliation action probably from a third party or an international group has actually been successful because I can think of places where maybe it hasn't worked.

Monica Toft: Yeah, I mean, I think the closest, but as you know, it's still questionable.

A couple. One is, for Yugoslavia, there hasn't been an outbreak of large-scale violence. Yes, there's been tensions, there has been conflict.

Another is Northern Ireland, but, as we know, there are still tensions there.

So it takes a long time. So there have been cases. And then, of course, Cyprus, there's been one person who has been killed as a result of this political-style violence.

So, we just have to be really patient and be willing to bear the costs as an outside community, right, to have these peacekeepers sitting there, or accept that there's going to have to be partition, each side is going to have to have the capacity to defend itself in order to be able to feel as if that it can live freely as a nation state.

Robin Pomeroy: A lot of people would say that multilateralism has had its day. Maybe you get that from the certain parts of the US right now as well, that we should focus on ourselves and let other people fight their own wars. Is that feeling on the rise and where do you see that going?

Monica Toft: So I would cast it a little bit differently.

You know, even during the Cold War, there were some places, because they were in the vital interests of the bigger parties, right, the major powers, were willing to intervene and intercede. And in other cases, we didn't care. We just let the fighting duke it out, right?

So there always has been a sense of, do we want to call it hypocrisy? I'm not sure it's hypocrisy, but where there's vital national interests, they'd get involved, or there's such a humanitarian crisis that we could not turn a blind eye.

Where we are today is, I think, a big issue is the United States, all right? We can talk about the United States sort of stepping away from the Washington consensus, stepping away from multilateralism, stepping from one of its pillars of U.S. foreign policy, which was the protection of human rights.

The other three are free trade, non-proliferation. We're still supporting that, right? It's one of the reasons why we don't like Iranian proliferation. And last is we hate regional hegemons. In the old days, now we hate global hegemony, which is why there is tension between China and the United States.

But the United States, one of its table legs of its foreign policy and national security policy used to be protection of human rights. And the U.S. has pulled back from that.

I'm not sure that the Europeans have. I think that there still is a sense amongst the Europeans, particularly, you can think about Ukraine. The Europeans are really backing Ukraine, and not just for vital security interests, but also because there's a violation of international law when Russian President Vladimir Putin decided to invade Ukraine.

The United States has been ambivalent about that. And so because the U.S. helped to erect these structures after World War II, and it has pulled back, there does seem to be a sense that multilateralism is waning.

What I would say is I'm not sure yet whether this is a blip of this administration or it's a longer-term trend. And even as a trend, what I would say, Robin, is that in the past the entire world did not support this. We're sitting in China right now China believes in the sovereignty of countries and that they have the right to do their own thing. Doesn't believe in the intervention If a state's going to predate on this population, it's not going to intervene.

The United States and its allies do and have. The United States now seems less comfortable under this particular administration with an America First policy. And unless it absolutely aligns up with US vital interests, I'm not sure we're going to engage and then engage multilaterally to do something about it.

So it's a little bit more complex than saying we've backed off from multilateralism. The entire world wasn't there initially to begin with, even since the '40s. And then I think the critical factor right now is the United States, because it always was sort of the leader on the multilateral front because it had the lift capacity. It had the willingness to be able to go into a country to help alleviate the suffering. And my sense is, reading the way that the Trump administration is, it probably will not intervene.

Robin Pomeroy: Do you think it's easier to seek peace in 2025 than it was in 2020 or a hundred years ago? There are tools at our disposal. There is understanding. In theory, all the knowledge is out there. Does that help us? Are there other things that have got worse that just make it so much more difficult to be a peacekeeper or peacemaker.

Monica Toft: That is such a brilliant question and so difficult to answer.

So I'm just going to answer to you off the cuff. I think my argument would be that I think it's easier for two reasons.

One is that war is now so destructive. And I think we do understand that things can escalate to a point where too many are going to die. That doesn't mean it's not going to happen. But I think if there's a possibility of peace that the destructiveness helps to contribute to that.

And then secondarily related to that is that we've seen it. We saw it in the 20th century. We witnessed it on a large scale, meaning that we all bore witness to it as a race. It was World War I and World War II. And today in the world that we live in with mass communication, social media, we are seeing the human suffering on a minute-by-minute dimension. We're constantly, each of us, getting feeds on our phones. There's just zero denying that folks are suffering as a result of these wars.

So in a paradoxical sort of way, I think that they reinforce each other. That I do think that it should be easier for us to get peace. That doesn't mean that we're not going to have war. I think we're going to continue, unfortunately, to have people who are willing to pull out the sword and dabble with it. But I think you'll get other people coming in and saying, okay, we need to pull this one back.

Robin Pomeroy: Monica Toft is Professor and Director of the Center for Strategic Studies; at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University in the United States.

Happymon Jacob is Founder and Director of the India-based Council for Strategic and Defense Research and is something of an expert on nuclear proliferation.

As I mentioned in the introduction to this episode, we were speaking as Israel was bombing Iran, in what it said was a military intervention targeting Iran’s nuclear programme. I asked Happymon Jacob whether that would help deter states seeking nuclear weapons, or might encourage it.

Happymon Jacob: I would say that my professional opinion as a student of international relations and non-proliferation for the last several, couple of decades, if there was one time in the history of the post-1945 world affairs, this is the most opportune time for countries that are desirous of developing nuclear weapons to think along those lines.

I visit Ukraine quite often. There is a feeling in Ukraine if we hadn't given up nuclear weapons, we'd have been secure today. There is the feeling in South Korea today that because North Korea has nuclear weapons they keep threatening us from time to time, it's probably time that we thought about nuclear weapons too. The public opinion in Japan is slightly, if not in a major way, shifting in a very small measure, shifting favour of thinking about nuclear weapons.

So, I think there is a feeling that nuclear weapons provide you with that kind of existential security. If Iran had developed nuclear weapons, Israel probably wouldn't have attacked Iran. North Korea is going scot-free simply because Kim has nuclear weapons.

The non-proliferation regime has, in some ways, declined in its ability to ensure that states don't develop nuclear weapons or think along the lines of developing nuclear weapons.

The good thing, of course, is that we were at a certain point of time in the 2000s worried about nuclear terrorism, and that has in some way gone away. There is no worry about nuclear terrorism, but there is a question about whether nuclear weapons do provide ultimate security. In fact, there is a big debate in the field of international relations. Whether more nuclear weapon states will mean a more stable international system.

I haven't really decided which part of, on which side of the debate I am. Some people argue that more nuclear weapons mean more instability and more insecurities. Some say that's not true.

This has been the most opportune time in post-World War II history for nuclear aspirants to perhaps try their luck in developing nuclear weapons. There isn't going to be too much pushback, especially if friendly countries proliferate. By friendly countries, I mean South Korea is the alliance partner of the United States, if they think about developing nuclear weapons there's only probably so much that the United States is going to push them in the opposite direction.

Robin Pomeroy: If it is desirable to pursue nonproliferation, and you said you're slightly on the fence there because you can see the logic of that stability and defence. But if it is desirable, and I think certainly the world used to think it was in general, how would you achieve that? If that door is really wide open right now, what's the way of closing it?

Happymon Jacob: I think there are two issues here, issue number one is that of universal nuclear disarmament. If there is one country that has nuclear weapons, the others are unlikely to say that we will give up our nuclear weapons. So that's part one.

In the 1950s, the world had actually seriously thought about giving up their nuclear weapons and submitting all the nuclear material to an international body. That never took place.

So you do have about eight nuclear weapon states today. If all of them do not come together and have a deadline for universal nuclear disarmament, it is unlikely to take place. That's point number one.

The second point is, even if, say, some states, the United States and China or Russia, say we are going to give up nuclear weapons, probably some of the other weaker states may not want to give up weapons today because what nuclear weapons do is to sort of, they create a certain amount of parity in terms of the perception of security.

Pakistan is a conventionally much weaker power than India. The reason why Pakistan is able to stand up to India and can pose a challenge to India is because Pakistan has nuclear weapons.

Same goes for Russia and the United States. Russia has a $2 trillion economy. The United States is a $24 trillion economy. There is no match in their conventional power. But Russia has 2,500 nuclear weapons. So that makes it a major power to reckon with.

If tomorrow Russia gives up nuclear weapons, even with its conventional power, it will not be a match to the United States.

So there's a second aspect, which is even if some powerful states want to give up their nuclear weapons the others might not want to. So there are, I think, two issues here.

And I'm not, to be honest, I'm very positive that there is going to be a global momentum towards non-proliferation any time in future.

Robin Pomeroy: This is a massive failing of the international system, isn't it?

Happymon Jacob: The international system has been failing for some time. I think this is another nail in the coffin of the post-World War II international order.

I mean, I sort of put some of the blame on the United States. The United States is the leader of the post-Second World War international order, and if they walk away from that order, there is nobody else that's going to sort of keep that order together. So unfortunately, the United States is its own worst revisionist enemy today, and that's why the system is crumbling. It's the system that they built.

Robin Pomeroy: Give me some reason to be optimistic, though. Are you able to sleep soundly at night because you think, there's progress in this and this area. You know, humanity's maybe getting smarter, getting kinder in some way.

Happymon Jacob: I'll tell you this, I think despite the failure of multilateralism, there is a recognition among states in various parts of the world that we need to invest in minilateralism and that we as groups of countries in the region come together and try and resolve the region's problems.

I'll give you the example of ASEAN, for instance, just came from a conference in Kuala Lumpur. Malaysia is the next chair of the ASEAN and they feel that the regional responsibility lies with us. We're going to take charge.

In the Indo-Pacific region, there is the Quad, for instance, Australia, Japan, India, and the United States. They talk about a lot of things. They talk climate change. They talk education. They talk technology transfer.

So some states in certain regions are coming together, and they're talking about connectivity. They're talking climate change. So even if multilateralism is failing, there's minilateralism that is on the rise.

So unless we have a new order, a new global order, I think some of these minilateral arrangements will keep the world moving and keep the world together.

Robin Pomeroy: What's your reflexion on how India's changed since you were born and what are those massive changes you've seen?

Happymon Jacob: I think some of the biggest changes in India are, one, there is a new openness to international economic realities, that we can't be a closed country in terms of economic openness, in terms of trade openness, and in terms free trade negotiations with the rest of the world. I think that autarky is a thing of the past now in the Indian mind.

Today India is negotiating a slew of free trade agreements, India is reaching out to the Indo-Pacific. As we speak, we are negotiating a free trade agreement with the United States, with the European Union, the United Kingdom with Australia, lef, right and centre.

So I think the socialist mindset that we had in India, that it's okay to be a little poor, it's OK not to be capitalistic, it's a big change in mindset. That's one part of it.

I think, the other is a certain positive approach to the international system. Remember, India was a colony of the United Kingdom for 200 years, and it became an independent country in 1940s, and a proud country, a newly decolonized country, but a country that has a very thin skin because it is a post-colonial country. So it reacted in some ways negatively to the international system, to partnerships, to alliances, to coalitions, et cetera. We are overcoming that.

There is a new feeling in India that India is a big country. It has to play a major role in the international system. To do that, you've got to reach out, you got to converse with people, you go to sit down with the minilateral arrangements. You might not like a certain country or the other, but you go sit down that country. India and China have problems with each other, but they're willing to sit with each other and talk about common good. I think there is that positive approach and proactive approach to the international world. That's, I think, one big change that I am seeing today.

And thirdly, I would say, unlike during the Cold War years, there was a certain ideological you know, way in which India looked at the international system, be that the United Nations itself and its organisations, or the Second World War international order, or United States of America for that matter. We had a certain ideological sort of hang-up when it came to addressing some of these institutional mechanisms in the international order. So India was very keen on the Non-Aligned Movement, India was a non-alligned country.

Today, I think India is willing to pick and choose India as we think, so what is in my interest? If this is of interest to me, I'm going to sort of go ahead and talk to this particular organisation. I'm going to sort of get into a mini-lateral arrangement or a coalition of the willing, call it what you have. But I think there is that openness and willing.

So a post-ideological sort of phase in Indian foreign policy. I think these are some of the big changes. As a student of international relations, I would say these are really heartwarming to see how India has changed in the last 20 years or so.

Robin Pomeroy: That's my optimism then, that there will be conversations even between countries and regions that don't get on in certain ways, they'll find common interests. And that will apply not just to India, right? I'm sure there are many other countries that have moved to that position that maybe they weren't at.

Happymon Jacob: Absolutely, I think that is so well put. You don't have to necessarily agree with everybody. All that you need is to have the willingness to sit down and talk to the other side. And I would say that that applies to individuals as much as it applies to countries and organisations.

Robin Pomeroy: Happymon Jacob Director of the Council for Strategic and Defense Research in India.

Aparna Bharadwaj is a Managing Director and Senior Partner at the Boston Consulting Group. She co-wrote a report for BCG called Ten Forces Reshaping Global Business - a paper that aims to help businesses understand geopolitics. I asked her to share some of the findings.

Aparna Bharadwaj: My name is Aparna Bharadwaj, I lead BCG's Global Advantage Practice and I'm based in Singapore.

Robin Pomeroy: You co-wrote a report for BCG, Ten Forces Reshaping Global Businesses. Can you give us a flavour of what that report sets out to do and what are maybe one or two of these forces that are reshapping global businesses?

Aparna Bharadwaj: Absolutely. So let me start with why we wrote this report and why we feel that it's been our flagship sort of way of explaining geopolitics to business.

We felt that there was a gap in understanding of geopolitics, not because of lack of media headlines, there were plenty of those, but in terms of interpreting the geopolitics and the newspaper headlines into what it means for strategy, what it mean for business leaders and how they need to pivot.

And so the 10 Forces tries to bring two languages together in that sense. What I basically do is use that to say, here's the few things that you really need to understand and the implications of this matter for you. I want to highlight a couple of those, if I may.

One is around this idea of unbalanced multipolarity. So yes, we're living in a multipolar world, but I don't like to think of the narrative as the days of globalisation are over or using 'de-globalisation'. I'd rather think that globalisation is changing in its DNA. Globalisation is becoming different in the next few years, and the next decade of globalisation is different from the last three decades. And that's because of unbalanced multipolarity.

We are living in a world with four poles, the way we see it. There's US and China, but there's also the Global South, 130 nations that form a third front. They don't choose to be in this geopolitics, but are anyway having to navigate it. And then the fourth front is Europe making its own pivot and finding its own path to competitiveness.

Now, multi-polarity by itself is not enough to cause volatility, but an unbalanced multi-polarity, where all of these four poles are making pivots of their own – US with America first, China with shifting towards the Global South and finding alternative markets for its products, Europe undergoing a reckoning to look for competitiveness, and Global South wanting to do business across geopolitical fractures and still searching for economic growth because they have much growth left to do. And so it's the unbalanced nature of this multipolarity that is the root cause of a lot of the geopolitics we see right now.

And what that does is it leads to certain competitive arenas and it leads two certain conflict arenas.

So the competitive arenas are of course, for example, technology and AI, or even competition on trade.

The conflict arenas around regional conflict, which we are seeing a lot of unfortunately right now, but also conflicts around what to do with climate and how climate change should or shouldn't be focused on.

So those are the kind of things that we try to unpack through 10 Forces and then interpret it for business leaders.

Robin Pomeroy: Let's talk about the Global South, then, you mentioned as one of those four poles or superpowers. Whether they like it or not, they're playing this global game. In the report, you talk about a confident Global South. I think you just mentioned it there. Why do you say confident?

Aparna Bharadwaj: So Global South is very close to my heart. All my life I've worked across Global South countries, not just in Asia, but across the world.

And the reason I say a confident Global South is that these countries have been given different monikers over time, called developing countries or emerging markets. And I didn't see them quite embrace that terminology, but suddenly these Global South countries are embracing the term Global South. It's an identity. You see that with the way the BRICS is expanding and the BRICS is becoming a forum for the Global South to work with each other and to work with the world.

BRICs is basically, it started as Brazil, Russia, India, China. Over time it's become BRICS++. So you've had South Africa joining in, you've had many of the ASEAN countries joining in and Saudi Arabia has been invited to join in. So BRICs is essentially a group of emerging markets, large emerging economies that are seeking to chart their own course and it's becoming a much more powerful voice around the world. Not just because of representing a large share of the global population, but if Saudi Arabia joins there'll be nearly half of the world's oil production and that's quite relevant as well.

Coming back to the topic of the Global South, why I call it a confident Global South is, one, they're embracing that term and identifying with it and saying this is a third front that does not want to be fractured by the multipolarity of the world.

The second reason I call it confident is the nations of the Global South, they want to do business with the East and the West. They want to do business across the geopolitical fractures. And so they are trying to work with the US while working with China, for example, on tariffs and trade, so on and so forth.

So these nations are emerging a lot more vocal, a lot more confident. We are also seeing South to South partnership going up.

So I work in ASEAN a lot. And the ASEAN nations are reaching a level of partnership that we've never before seen. They become galvanised around this idea of ASEAN collaboration and a common ASEAN voice.

Similarly, you're also seeing more south-to-south trade. So trade between China and the other countries of the Global South is up 6%. And in our forecast, we'll continue growing like that for the next 10 years. South-to south trade is growing faster than 5.5% a year. And this is, by the way, almost twice as fast as global trade. A lot of it is imports from China to the Global South, but it is also bidirectional. There's also imports in the other direction as well.

There's also flow of investments from China through many nations of the Global South. So China is a top trade partner for over 60 countries of the Global South.

So that's what I mean by a confident Global South.

One last thing I'll say is, you know how in a toughly contested election the swing states become very important? And what we are seeing is Global South are the swing states of the world right now, because they want to work across the multipolar lines. And so that's why they're more confident and that's why they have a bigger voice right now.

Robin Pomeroy: Where does India fit into this? Because India is arguably a global superpower itself or has ambitions to be one. And biggest population, huge economy, very dynamic, young population. Is it just another Global South country or will that emerge as a fifth pole or is it going to lead that fourth pole? Where do you see India fitting in?

Aparna Bharadwaj: Well, I'm born in India, so I would love to see India be the fifth pole. India is already the largest nation in the Global South and is incredibly powerful in that sense.

What is India trying to do? It was already a services superpower for the world. And India is trying to see if there's a path for them to also be a significant manufacturing player in the world. Now, the jury is still out on that. There are some wins, but it's too early days. But India would like to build a manufacturing position for itself that is really different, et cetera.

India is also positioning itself, and I think with good intent as well as a good right to do so, as one of the leaders of the Global South, to create that, craft that identity in the Global South as well. India's leadership has also been very vocal in the BRICS, trying to strengthen the BRICS, while also often being invited into the G20s and the G7s as an honorary invitee to try to be a part of that conversation as well.

Another thing I would say that India is doing really well is the path to neutrality is quite fascinating, that India's striking. In fact, India is a great example of being able to work across geopolitical fractures, to be able to import your energy from one particular group of countries, to do trade with another group of counties, to have strategic partnerships with another group of country.

What I find highly encouraging also is a move for India and China to normalise relationships as well. That for me will be a linchpin of how the global south evolves and how the BRICS will evolve. So I'm watching that very closely and very hopefully.

Robin Pomeroy: AI is something that's going to change business and a lot of other things, it already is doing. So where do you see it fitting in with your idea of this unbalanced multipolar world?

Aparna Bharadwaj: I think AI has become front and centre in how unbalanced multipolarity is playing out. And I'll explain that in a minute.

We have this concept that we wrote about and published on at BCG Centre for Geopolitics in our Global Advantage practise. It's called the geopolitics of AI. And the idea of the geopolitics of AI is that much like anything that matters, and AI definitely is incredibly important right now, it has been geopolitized.

So a few things. One, on the good side, it's very clear that if there is one sliver of clarity in a very volatile, complex world right now, it is that businesses need to invest in AI. So when I talk to business leaders around the world, they say there's a lot that I don't know, but I do know that AI is part of the solution. It helps me manage my cost. It helps bring down complexity and manage my complexity, navigate it. And so investment in AI is a no-regret move I can make. And that's more and more becoming a narrative I'm hearing.

Now, how does it get geopolitized? That's the second part. What we were seeing for a long time in AI was a very clear dominance by the US-led platforms, by the US-led players and solutions and LLMs. What we've seen right now is, I would say, two AI superpowers. And a set of AI middle powers. So the two AI superpowers are quite clearly US and China.

China is a number two, but a very credible number two. They have a significant gap to the US, but they're closing that gap pretty quickly.

And then the middle powers would be, well, Europe, as you mentioned, UAE, and GCC more broadly, and then others, right?

Let's talk about the superpowers first. US's dominance is pretty clear. If you look at a few different criteria we use to assess that, one is compute, the computing power. You've got 45 gigawatts of power. The next highest is China at 20 gigawatts. If you at the talent in AI, US has access to their own AI talent, but talent from all over the world. If you looked at foundational IP, fundamental IP, especially cutting edge IP, US is ahead of the game. So those are the benefits that US enjoys as the AI superpower.

But how is China closing that gap? Well, China's also got 20 gigawatts of compute power. They've got excellent AI talent. If you look at purely the AI graduates and the STEM graduates, China is ranking really high, number one in several criteria. China is also number one right now on AI publications, cited publications. So they're to catch up rapidly on foundational IP.

In addition to that, what we are seeing in China is the investment pattern. And it's actually very different from the US, but catching up rapidly.

In US, if you look at tech investment, there's been over $200 billion of investment and a good chunk in AI. In China, in contrast, you've got about 60 billion coming from the private sector, but you've put another 110 billion coming for venture capital backed by the government. So the government venture capital is stepping in, where US is led by private sector big tech investment and closing the gap on investment as well.

So I think China is emerging as a very credible number two player. Of course, I don't want to belabour what's been talked about a lot, how DeepSeek and other models have innovated in a much more agile and feisty manner using older technology. And so that commoditization of AI, not at the cutting edge, but certainly at the mainstream level, is another thing that China has brought to the world.

So those are the two superpowers, but much like multipolarity, the other poles are working on it as well. Europe is a number three, but with quite some distance, I think. What needs to be seen is how Europe would change and evolve their innovation. Catch up on fundamental IP. Yes, they have about eight gigawatts of compute power, but it's spread across multiple countries. So it requires collaboration.

So the jury is still out, but I'm hopeful that Europe will really step up on this.

The others are applying more in application of AI. You see some good LLMs from Japan and others, but you see much more application coming out of India and others. So even the AI game is reflecting that unbalanced multipolarity that I talked about.

Robin Pomeroy: Aparna Bharadwaj of the Boston Consulting Group.

You can find out about the WEF’s Global Future Council on Geopolitics on our website - link in the show notes

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This episode of Radio Davos was presented by me, Robin Pomeroy. Editing was by Jere Johansson. Studio production by Taz Kelleher.

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