Speculating post-war world -2

Continuing from yesterday - Speculating post-war world-1

Scenario 2: Rise of colonialism

There is a moment in the decline of every multilateral order when the strongest player realizes that the rules no longer constrain them — and that being constrained while others cheat is simply irrational. We may be approaching that moment. The US-Iran conflict has demonstrated, for any remaining doubters, that international law and UN Security Council resolutions are effective only insofar as the most powerful nations choose to observe them.

This is the premise of this second scenario: a world in which the post-war environment triggers not a retreat into national fortresses, but an aggressive outward expansion by two or three major powers — a resource grab dressed up in the language of security, development, and alliance. A second scramble, this time for rare earth minerals, water, arable land, deepwater ports, and human capital, in addition to the traditional prizes of oil and gas.

It is the darkest of the three scenarios I am exploring in this series. It is also, historically speaking, one of the most precedented.

The Historical Mirror: 1885 and 2026

In 1885, the major European powers convened the Berlin Conference to divide Africa among themselves. There were no African representatives at the table. In roughly three decades, 90% of the African continent passed under European colonial rule. The trigger was not malice alone — it was industrial capitalism’s insatiable demand for raw materials combined with the military and technological superiority of European states over African polities.

The parallel to 2026 is not exact but it is instructive. The trigger today is not coal and rubber — it is lithium, cobalt, rare earth elements, and water. The technologies that the developed world is betting its future on — electric vehicles, semiconductor fabrication, renewable energy infrastructure — all depend critically on mineral inputs that are geographically concentrated in politically unstable regions. The Democratic Republic of Congo holds an estimated 70% of the world’s cobalt. Chile, Argentina, and Bolivia command the Lithium Triangle. China controls 85% of global rare earth processing capacity.

In a post-war environment where the fiction of a rules-based international order has been further punctured, the temptation to secure these resources through coercive means — military bases, puppet governments, debt traps with real teeth, or outright annexation — becomes more politically viable.

The Race for Resources: What We Already See

The Return of Colonialism scenario does not require an imaginative leap. Its infrastructure is already being built, quietly and methodically, by multiple actors.

China’s Belt and Road Initiative, now in its second decade, has created a network of infrastructure debt across Africa, Central Asia, and South Asia that critics characterize as a form of strategic dependency. The Hambantota port in Sri Lanka — leased to China for 99 years after Sri Lanka could not service its debt — is the most cited example, though scholars debate whether it represents a deliberate strategy or opportunistic exploitation of fiscal distress. Either way, the outcome is the same: a foreign power with effective control over strategic infrastructure in a sovereign state.

Russia’s territorial expansion — Crimea in 2014, eastern Ukraine in 2022, and its post-war positioning in the South Caucasus — follows a different but related logic. It is the assertion that geographic proximity plus military superiority confers the right to determine the political status of neighboring territories. This logic, once normalized, is extraordinarily difficult to contain.

The United States, meanwhile, has used financial infrastructure — SWIFT exclusion, dollar clearing dominance, secondary sanctions — to exercise a form of economic coercion that functions as soft annexation of policy space. The imposition of oil sanctions on Iran, Venezuela, and Russia are exercises of sovereign power over third-country economic decisions.

The Weaponization of Technology and Space

The Return of Colonialism scenario has a twenty-first century dimension that the nineteenth century version lacked: the race for technological and space dominance. The scholar Alfred McCoy, in his work In the Shadows of the American Century, argues that control of the global commons — sea lanes, cyberspace, and now space — is the modern equivalent of controlling trade routes. Whoever dominates these commons sets the rules for everyone else.

The US-China competition in semiconductors, artificial intelligence, and space capabilities is already a defining feature of the current era. The CHIPS Act in the US, the EU’s semiconductor sovereignty push, China’s Made in China 2025 and its successor initiatives — these are not merely industrial policies. They are assertions of technological sovereignty that carry unmistakable echoes of nineteenth century imperial competition for industrial advantage.

In space, the Artemis Accords — championed by the US and now signed by over 30 nations — essentially propose a framework for lunar resource extraction that mirrors the Berlin Conference logic: the major powers agree among themselves on the rules, and others are invited to accept them or be excluded. China has refused to sign and is building a parallel space architecture with Russia. The militarization of space, already underway with anti-satellite weapons testing by the US, China, Russia, and India, adds a military dimension to what was once framed purely as scientific competition.

Democracy’s Retreat

One of the most consequential features of the Return of Colonialism scenario is its impact on governance forms. The liberal democratic model assumed, for three decades after the Cold War, that it represented the end point of political evolution — Francis Fukuyama’s famous thesis. That assumption has been steadily eroding since 2016, and the West Asia conflict may have dealt it a serious blow.

The research of Larry Diamond at Stanford’s Hoover Institution documents what he calls a democratic recession — a global decline in the quality and scope of democratic governance that has been underway since approximately 2006. The Freedom House index has recorded seventeen consecutive years of declining global freedom. The post-war environment, characterized by security anxiety and resource competition, tends to favor strongman governance, where decisiveness and control are valued over accountability and rights.

Theocracy — which the author of the original text flags as potentially regaining prominence — deserves particular attention. In the Middle East and parts of South and Southeast Asia, the failure of secular nationalist models to deliver economic security has consistently strengthened Islamist political movements. The Iranian revolution itself was a response to the perceived corruption and Westernization of the Pahlavi dynasty. In Turkey, Egypt, Pakistan, and Tunisia, the pattern has repeated with variations. A post-war environment that further delegitimizes Western liberal values will strengthen these alternatives.

The Human Cost: Mass Death in the Periphery

Perhaps the most disturbing feature of the Return of Colonialism scenario is its demographic consequence. The nineteenth century scramble was accompanied by famines, forced labor, and population collapse across colonized territories. King Leopold’s Congo lost an estimated half of its population. The Bengal famine of 1943 killed between 2 and 3 million people under wartime colonial governance.

The twenty-first century version would not take the same form — there are no colonial governors and no official labor extraction regimes. But the functional outcome could be similar. A world in which the great powers prioritize resource extraction over human development, in which climate change is weaponized through food system disruption, in which war becomes endemic across multiple theatres simultaneously — this is a world where mortality in poor countries rises sharply.

The Lancet and WHO projections on climate-related mortality already suggest tens of millions of excess deaths by 2050 under high-emissions scenarios. Add armed conflict, disrupted food systems, and collapsed health infrastructure — all consistent with the Return of Colonialism scenario — and the demographic catastrophe in the developing world becomes very large indeed.

Meanwhile, the developed world faces the opposite problem. Low fertility rates in Europe, Japan, and South Korea have created structural labor shortages. In a neocolonial world, the solution is not open immigration — it is selective import of skilled labor under conditions that favor the receiving country and strip the sending country of its human capital. Brain drain, rather than population growth, defines the demographic story of the periphery.

What This Means for India

India occupies a peculiarly vulnerable but also strategically interesting position in the Return of Colonialism scenario. It is large enough that no great power can simply ignore it or coerce it into submission — 1.4 billion people with nuclear weapons and a credible military are not a compliant client state. But it is also resource-dependent enough — particularly on oil, critical minerals, and increasingly on semiconductor imports — to be vulnerable to supply-chain coercion.

India’s strategic response — the policy of strategic autonomy, membership in multiple overlapping groupings like QUAD, SCO, BRICS, and the G20 — is well-suited to a transitional world. But in a world that has definitively split into two or three imperial blocs, strategic ambiguity becomes increasingly costly. India will eventually face pressure to choose sides, and the terms of that choice will be set by others.

The optimistic reading is that India’s scale, its democratic legitimacy, and its geographic position make it an indispensable partner for any great power coalition — not a client but a swing state. The pessimistic reading is that a neocolonial world respects scale only when backed by coercive capability, and that India’s internal fractures — economic inequality, communal tension, institutional stress — reduce its effective bargaining power.

A World Nobody Should Want — But Might Get

The Return of Colonialism scenario is not inevitable. It requires a specific set of conditions: the failure of multilateral institutions to adapt, the escalation of resource competition to the point of military coercion, and the replacement of democratic governance by authoritarian alternatives across enough major states to normalize the new order.

But history’s lesson is that these conditions have been met before, and more than once. The first globalization ended in a world war. The interwar period produced fascism, Stalinist terror, and colonial famine. The comfortable assumption that we have evolved beyond these outcomes rests on institutions and norms that are, right now, under serious strain.

In the final post of this series, I explore the most hopeful of the three scenarios: a Multi-Axis World in which the conflict forces not fragmentation or domination, but a genuine restructuring of the global order around more equitable and durable foundations.

Also read

Scenario 1: Deglobalization