Strategic Challenges 2026: Die or Get Rich?

Over the last 25 years, I've written several New Year's columns discussing global strategic challenges. The essay typically sketched ongoing violence, potential violence or the very rare instance of peaceful settlement.

Five years ago, "strategic challenges" became an annual event with one to five or six type lists. In the initial columns, U.S. concerns framed the challenges and the rank order.

Why the U.S. frame? I'm an American. Am I a shortsighted parochialist? Don't think so. The U.S. is the world's only global superpower. However, on Planet Earth, superpower power has definitive limits. I've spent quality time in what certain groups call the developing world. That's supposed to be a progressive term, but it's an insult. Human beings I met in those places (East Africa, Central America, Southwest Asia, Southeast Asia) are well developed. They darn well knew what matters to them.

With that as both theoretical and personal background, let's define strategic as a fancy word for complex macro issues that create huge problems beyond borders or, on the flip side, create needs and solutions that are a path to enormous human benefits.

The killer asteroid may be the ultimate Hollywood downside example. An end-of-the-Cretaceous-type asteroid threatens human existence.

But deflecting or destroying the killer asteroid would involve U.S. technology -- and probably SpaceX missiles.

Strategic benefits resolved? Decades-long haggles over how to spread the exponential wealth. And that does occur.

Strategic problems unresolved? Forget the planet-killer asteroid. Ignored or poorly confronted strategic problems always (always) produce deadly events, and often war-igniting events that are called catastrophes. Another word for these catastrophes: deadly disorder.

So we encounter the trick word in the common diplomatic term "international order." The trick word: order.

Welcome to 2026, where the order that exists is both resilient and tenuous.

The challenges listed below are not ranked, with this homicidal caveat: Wars employing nuclear and/or biological weapons raise the body count from thousands and tens of thousands to the multimillions. "Boosted" biological weapons could kill billions. "Boosted" means genetically manipulated bioweapons could defeat antibiotics, antivirals and vaccines. I don't write this for a Daily Mail headline. It's a warning directed to the sane that the evil prospect is quite real.

CHALLENGE NO. 1: Stopping Rogue and Small-Power Nuclear War.

Multiple mini-nuclear wars are a huge threat.

However, the U.S. Air Force's 2025 Operation Midnight Hammer, which destroyed Ayatollah Iran's nuclear weapons-making capacities, demonstrated this challenge can be stopped cold if the U.S. president has the guts to order the mission. Japan and South Korea have the tactical and operational conventional weapons to destroy North Korea's nukes should they choose. Destruction of North Korean nukes is all but certain if the U.S. adds its firepower to Japan's and South Korea's.

What does China do? Reasonable question. My bet: Beijing screams and does nothing.

CHALLENGE NO. 2: Avoiding Superpower Nuclear War.

Russia is only a superpower in nuclear weapons, but that still counts. The Russia-Ukraine War is definitely waged under the threat of Russia's nuclear dagger. Use a nuke in Europe, and some NATO nation will likely be hit or suffer fallout. That's one reason President Trump puts up with Putin's lies. But whatever the settlement in Ukraine, Ukraine has the brains and technology to produce its own nuclear weapons.

CHALLENGE NO. 3: Disintegrative Warfare.

In the 21st century, nukes have forced alternative warfare. To paraphrase Communist Chinese theorists, 21st-century warfare must use everything.

This leads to the biggest threat to the U.S., China, European states, India and ... everybody: disintegrative warfare.

The term appears in chapter 13 of a book called "World System History: The Social Science of Long-Term Change." In a disintegrative war, a "unitary belligerent becomes increasingly fragmented by secessions."

Or, instead of classic territorial secession, social and economic fragmentation spawned and accelerated by corrupt local and state political machines, violent crime encouraged by -- in the case of the U.S. -- George Soros-backed district attorneys who put murderers and rapists back on the street, and deadly drugs and more violent criminals crossing open borders.

The date 2002 is ballpark. "Unrestricted Warfare," written by Chinese strategists Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui, mulls weaponizing almost everything human beings do or want to do. But by 2011, China's strategic intent was evident, and the cartel connectivity was emerging.

According to several sources, fentanyl's so-called second wave hit the U.S. in 2007 -- fentanyl cut with heroin. In 2013, overdoses from synthetic opioids like fentanyl increased dramatically.

Communist China was and remains the world's primary source of fentanyl. Beijing either ships it directly to the U.S. or smuggles it via Mexico. It's a two-for-one -- making money while destroying America.

In 2017, the National Interest called China's drug strategy vis-a-vis the U.S. the "Reverse Opium War." From 1839-1842, China's Qing dynasty went to war with Britain to stop the Brits from selling opium in China. The drug threatened Chinese social cohesion. China became a failed state.

Big Debt plays a role in disintegrative warfare. In the U.S., 2022's hyperinflation and government budget excess exacerbated Washington's debt problem. Washington's structural debt is the biggest self-inflicted threat the U.S. faces.

Big Debt, however, is a global sickness. Communist China's property bust exemplifies Big Debt -- but Beijing's property bust wasn't imported. Chinese Communist bureaucrats and the dictatorial system created the property bust.

Corruption, from within or spurred externally, accelerates disintegration. The pervasive corruption of influential but venal individuals (leaders?), venal institutions and venal communities in all nations and tribes impoverishes everyone. In democracies, embedded political corruption systemically delays, undermines or immobilizes effective legal and public response to its systemic threat.

The $9 billion to $18 billion child welfare, poverty and medical assistance scams now under investigation in Minnesota illustrate the destructive power of disintegrative war.

Theft in billions leads to CHALLENGE NO. 4: Flailing states, failed states and totally fake states immersed in anarchic violence that spills over political borders and sends millions into exile. (Note: "Flailing" means collapsing. In fake states, local thugs control the capital, the United Nations seat and little else.) Rwanda versus Congo is a weak state versus a failed state. It is also a resource war. Eastern Congo has a treasure trove of minerals.

Millions of refugees fleeing deadly violence. Valuable resources controlled by criminal gangs calling themselves freedom fighters.

Thus, failed states become global problems plagued by economically significant violence.

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To find out more about Austin Bay and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.

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