Open a news app on any morning this year and just watch the headlines go by. A trade story, then a drought story, then something about a bond yield, then a satellite. A few years ago you’d have read those as four different beats, written by four different reporters, for four different kinds of reader. Now they blur together. I don’t think that’s the app’s fault. I think the world has quietly stopped keeping those stories apart.
That’s why this year feels different to me. I don’t mean worse, because worse has been the background noise for a long time. I mean different, as if something shifted and we all felt it without having the words. The best I can come up with is that we stopped being able to pretend the problems are separate.
For years we kept them in boxes. Climate in one, debt in another, trade wars over here, water over there, each with its own tidy panel of experts. Somewhere along the way the walls came down. It’s all one room now, and the room is on fire.
Start with the people whose job is to be calm about this. The WEF Global Risks Report put geoeconomic confrontation at the top of the global risk list this year, up eight places in two years, and said economic risks are climbing faster than anything else. Translated out of Davos-speak, the world is cracking along economic lines and the cracks are getting wider. US-China trade is down more than 20% since 2024. The WTO has said the multilateral trading system faces its most severe challenge in 80 years, and that the next few years will decide whether the global economy recovers or just keeps fragmenting. I used to call this a trade war. These days it looks more like a divorce, with nobody even pretending to negotiate over who gets the supply chains.
But the trade story alone doesn’t explain the feeling. What changed is that the crises have started feeding each other, so you can’t fix one without tripping over the other three.
Take water. The Pacific Institute counted 420 water-related conflicts in 2024, up 18% in a single year, and 2026 looks set to beat that. Fights over shared rivers have become real geopolitical flashpoints. Desalination plants have been hit in Yemen, Ukraine, Gaza and the Gulf. In places that are already bone-dry, water infrastructure has stopped being treated as civilian, and has become a target. Think about what that means for an ordinary family there. When someone bombs the water supply, they aren’t only fighting a war, they’re telling millions of people that their survival is up for negotiation.
Then there’s debt, which I think gets far less attention than it deserves. The median developing country now spends 9.5% of all government revenue just on interest, the highest in 25 years and about three times what rich countries pay. Ten-year bonds for weaker-credit countries are sitting around 9%. And right when these governments need help most, aid is disappearing. Official development assistance fell 23% in 2025, the biggest drop ever recorded, and it’s expected to fall another 5.8% this year. So you get less help and more expensive borrowing, for countries that can barely service what they already owe. Call it a debt crisis if you like, but it looks more like a trap to me, and it’s closing on 3.7 billion people.
Underneath all of this is a quieter scramble for the materials that will shape the next century: lithium, cobalt, rare earths. The US-China fight over critical minerals is now playing out in Africa, Southeast Asia and Latin America. What matters isn’t who owns the mine so much as who controls what happens next, the refining and the processing. Right now that’s China, by a wide margin. So any country trying to build something green, or high-tech, or military, ends up leaning on a single supplier who has no reason to stop being the bottleneck. The EU is already falling behind the US in locking supply down, and both trail China.
Then there’s space, which I never expected to be writing about in a piece like this. The US has confirmed it has weapons in orbit. China says it is turning space into a battlefield. Russia says there’s still time for a treaty, though not much. The militarisation of space has a long history going back to the Cold War, so I’m not claiming it’s new. What worries me is the shift from dual-use satellites to actual weapons, parked above us right now, while everyone else is expected to look up and trust that nobody will use them.
So what ties it all together? The Munich Security Conference called it “destructive politics” and named the US as the most conspicuous destroyer of the post-war order. That isn’t coming from some anti-American think tank. It’s Europe’s top security forum. Their argument, as I read it, was that Washington is no longer even pretending to lead by consent. It’s openly building its capacity to inflict harm and manufacturing anxiety to stay on top. When the hegemon stops behaving like a hegemon and starts behaving like a warlord, everyone else has to recalibrate.
And they are, quickly. Developing countries are trading more with each other because demand from rich countries is weak. Almost two-thirds of global trade now moves through value chains that are being actively torn up and redrawn for geopolitical reasons. The supply chain chaos of 2026 doesn’t look like a glitch to me, it looks like the design. The WEF describes it as “constant and structural,” and that last word should worry you more than any single headline. Structural means not temporary and not something we can manage our way out of. It means this is simply how things are now.
So what do we do about it? Honestly, I don’t know, and I don’t think anyone does. I get suspicious when someone shows up with a confident five-point plan.
What I do know is that the people telling us to stay calm and trust the institutions are largely the same people who spent a decade telling us these crises were separate and manageable. They aren’t separate. And taken one at a time, they aren’t manageable either.
I think of it as one thing, the Everything Crisis. Economic fragmentation, water wars, debt traps, mineral races and weapons in orbit all strike me as symptoms of the same condition, a world where cooperation gets treated as weakness, every relationship is transactional, and the only question left is who has leverage over whom.
I’m not a doomer, and I don’t believe the world is ending. But I do think we’re stuck in the in-between, that ugly stretch between an old order that’s dying and a new one that hasn’t been born. The people who pay the most in the in-between are never the great powers. It’s the small countries with no leverage to hedge. It’s the villages whose water gets poisoned, and the families whose government can’t cover the interest on its own debt. It’s the workers whose jobs hang on supply chains being redrawn by people they’ll never meet. They live inside the Everything Crisis every single day, while the rest of us argue over whether it’s real.
The house is on fire and the walls between the rooms are gone. We keep standing in the doorway, waiting for someone to tell us what to do, and I’ve started to suspect nobody is coming. It’s just us, the smoke, and however much time we’ve got.
Everything Crisis, polycrisis, global risks 2026, WEF Global Risks Report, geoeconomic confrontation, economic fragmentation, US-China trade, WTO, supply chains, water wars, water conflict, desalination, developing country debt, debt trap, development aid cuts, critical minerals, lithium, rare earths, cobalt, space weapons, militarization of space, Munich Security Conference, destructive politics, world order, geopolitics, Global South, opinion
the Everything Crisis
why 2026 feels different
geoeconomic confrontation top global risk
US-China trade decline since 2024
water conflicts rising 2026
developing countries interest payments debt
aid cuts 2025 biggest drop
China critical minerals refining dominance
weapons in space 2026
Munich Security Conference destructive politics
structural supply chain fragmentation
crises feeding each other
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