Geopolitical fragmentation as permanent operating system
October 2025 is documenting something that most commentators still interpret as "temporary crisis" to overcome: in reality we're observing the structural normalisation of a world without neutral third spaces. It's not instability, it's the new equilibrium.
The pattern emerges when you look at data simultaneously across different domains: armed conflicts, digital infrastructure, commercial maritime routes. Three apparently separate systems converging towards the same endpoint: the impossibility of maintaining neutral positions.
The collapse of diplomacy as resolution mechanism
The numbers tell a precise story. 59 active conflicts globally, the highest number since the end of World War II. But the truly revealing data point isn't the absolute quantity: it's that conflicts ending with peace agreements have collapsed from 23% in the 1970s to 4% in the last decade. Simultaneously, decisive military victories have dropped from 49% to 9%.
What does this pattern mean? Not that we've suddenly become more aggressive as a species. It means that diplomacy is structurally disincentivised. Conflicts no longer close with either victories or agreements, they simply internationalise and become permanent. 78 countries are involved in conflicts beyond their borders. War is no longer an event with beginning and end, it's a continuous state of militarised competition.
The mechanism is clear: when peace agreements collapse in 96% of cases, no rational actor invests political resources in diplomacy. Better to maintain active military capacity. It's a suboptimal Nash equilibrium: each move is individually rational, collectively they produce the worsening of the global system.
Digital sovereignty as mandatory cost, not ethical choice
In the digital domain, identical pattern with different dynamics.
80% of European cloud spending, €265 billion, goes to American providers. But now these providers apply 30-40% premiums for "sovereign" European services. Data sovereignty is no longer an optional based on ethical preferences, it's an operational cost you must buy because trust between blocs has collapsed.
The American CLOUD Act projects US jurisdiction onto any data managed by American companies, wherever in the world it's physically stored. European GDPR requires territorial control over citizens' data. Two contradictory imperatives that transform every technological choice into a geopolitical choice.
Providers have monetised this contradiction by creating a two-tier market: standard global services and premium "sovereign" solutions with 30-40% markup. It's not technological innovation, it's geopolitical pricing. You're paying for the separation that global trust architecture can no longer guarantee freely.
Europe consumes 20% of global microchips but produces only 9%. Dependency on suppliers in geopolitically unstable regions. When Starlink disconnects in Ukraine compromising military operations, it's not a technical bug, it's a reminder that every digital infrastructure has a flag, and that flag has veto power.
The Red Sea as laboratory of ineffective deterrence
At sea, the pattern manifests with brutal clarity.
Operation EUNAVFOR ASPIDES, European defensive mission to protect navigation in the Red Sea, escorts ships and shoots down Houthi drones. It has accompanied over 370 ships in its first year. €17 million budget extended until February 2026. Continuous and operational European military presence.
Result: container traffic has nonetheless dropped 80% compared to the previous year. Maritime companies prefer the alternative route around Africa, longer, more expensive, more polluting, rather than rely on European military protection.
Why? Because ASPIDES operates with defensive mandate: escorts ships, intercepts aerial threats, rescues shipwrecked sailors. But it doesn't impose strategic costs on those who destabilise. The Houthis can continue attacks because the worst-case scenario is seeing their drones shot down. There's no real deterrence, only tactical mitigation.
Compare with US-UK approach (Operation Prosperity Guardian): strikes on Yemeni territory to hit offensive capabilities. More aggressive, but equally ineffective in re-establishing trust. Why? Because the problem isn't military, it's structural. The Houthis are proxies of Iran-Saudi Arabia-US competition. As long as that competition continues, the Red Sea remains unstable.
European military presence doesn't re-establish trust, it certifies that trust no longer exists.
The systemic mechanism: when everyone fortifies, neutrality becomes impossible
Three different domains (conflicts, cloud, seas), same structural pattern. Why?
Applied game theory: we're in a repeated game without defined horizon where cooperation has been replaced by reciprocal defection. Once enough players have defected, continuing to cooperate becomes a dominated strategy. You always lose.
In the language of social design: incentives are misaligned. Each actor optimises for individual survival (arming, sovereign cloud, route control), but the aggregate of these choices destroys the commons (peace, open global internet, freedom of navigation).
Evolutionary path: these patterns self-reinforce. The more fragmentation increases, the more costly it becomes to maintain neutrality, the more players abandon neutrality, the more fragmentation increases. It's a positive feedback loop (in the technical sense: self-amplifying) towards ever-greater polarisation.
Via negativa: what NOT to do if operating in this environment
Don't wait for "normality to return". This is normality now. The post-Cold War world with globalisation and possible neutrality is finished. Not temporarily, structurally.
Don't design systems that assume trust between blocs. If your business model, your supply chain, your technological infrastructure assumes that USA-China-Europe will cooperate, you're building on non-existent foundations.
Don't confuse "presence" with "deterrence". ASPIDES escorts ships but doesn't change actors' strategic calculations. Real deterrence requires explicit and non-negotiable costs for those who destabilise. Otherwise it's just expensive security theatre.
Don't pay premium for "sovereignty" without true functional separation. If you buy sovereign cloud but your critical data can still be accessed by hostile jurisdiction via contractual clauses, you're paying for sovereignty-washing, not sovereignty.
The architecture of resilience in a fragmented world
If fragmentation is permanent, what are the strategic moves?
Functional separation between inevitable dependencies and critical sovereignty. You can't be sovereign over everything, too expensive. But you can identify what's truly critical (health data, energy infrastructure, defence technologies) and build structural separation there. The rest can remain in global commons with appropriate risk management.
Antifragility instead of robustness. Robust systems resist shocks but don't improve. Antifragile systems become stronger under stress. Example: supply chain that diversifies suppliers after disruption isn't just more resilient, it's antifragile if that diversification opens new commercial opportunities.
Positioning as indispensable equilibrium point. Europe can't compete militarily with the US or economically with China. But it can become the player everyone needs for standards, certifications, contractual reliability. Intellectual seduction through competence, not through power.
Different metrics for different environment. Don't measure success in "tonnes of goods" through Red Sea or "% market share" cloud. Measure in "days of techno-energetic resilience without imports from hostile actors". Metrics for antifragility, not for efficiency.
The insight others aren't seeing
Most commentators still talk about "crisis to overcome" or "return to international cooperation". They're using cognitive maps from the pre-2020 world.
The real pattern is different: fragmentation isn't a bug to fix, it's the new global operating system. Like when the Internet shifted from open academic network to balkanised commercial infrastructure. You don't go back, you adapt or become irrelevant.
Those who continue to design systems (business, technological, military, diplomatic) for an interconnected world with possible neutrality are building cognitive Maginot Lines. Perfect for the previous world, useless for the current one.
Strategic autonomy isn't ideology or nostalgia for national grandeur. It's rational engineering for a world where every link can be weaponised, every dependency can become coercive leverage, every neutral space can collapse overnight.
The operational question isn't "how do we return to globalisation?" It's "how do I build systems that function even when globalisation is selective, intermittent, weaponised?"
That's the question separating those observing the new pattern from those still looking at the old map.
Data cited from Global Peace Index 2025 (Institute for Economics & Peace), Operation EUNAVFOR ASPIDES (EU Council), and reports on European digital sovereignty (Cloud Transformation Observatory Politecnico Milano, Agenda Digitale). 152,000 conflict deaths in 2024, 87 countries in peace deterioration, economic costs of violence equal to $19.97 trillion (11.6% of global GDP).