By winning Wisconsin after winning Georgia and North Carolina, Donald Trump wins the 2024 presidential election. From a cindynic point of view, this victory highlights two major issues: one concerns the evolution of warfare and conflictualities, the other risks and vulnerabilities. And the two are intertwined.
The 2024 presidential election has been marked by relentless informational operations: disinformation is becoming a common practice, increased by the democratization of internet access and the difficulty legislators have in producing appropriate texts, in the absence of a sufficiently high level of public debate. This disinformation can be attributed either to US politicians or activists such as Elon Musk, who doesn't hesitate to use Twitter as he pleases, or to foreign powers, notably Russia. Hybrid warfare is now the ideological framework of Russian foreign policy, which validates the warnings of Informational Cindynics, which developed in a general context of underestimation, notably institutional, of informational threats.
A major vulnerability for the coming decades is therefore the informational vulnerability of populations, such as Donald Trump's electorate in the United States, or Sahelian populations in Africa. This vulnerability will increase dramatically with the development of artificial intelligence, the ability to produce and distribute credible texts, to generate false images, and even to manipulate knowledge or the public's perception of it.
Russia's hybrid warfare will persist and destabilize the international balance: unable to increase its absolute power, Russia can only increase its relative power by undermining that of its adversaries, through interference and destabilization, fueling divergences and fabricating racial hatred. Conflictualities will therefore continue to grow, and the UN will probably not have the capacity to counter this trend, despite initiatives such as the pact for the future adopted in September 2024 amid relative media indifference.
Moreover, the new US President is a climate sceptic who did not hesitate to withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement in 2017. Beyond the impact of his future decisions on the energy transition, this should raise awareness of the need to take the geopolitical factor into account in transition analyses and policies. Today, most analyses are based on technical arguments, with certain solutions, such as hydrogen, considered unrealistic. But: solutions that seem technically realistic, such as an all-lithium/copper scenario, may turn out to be totally unrealistic. Technical approaches are insufficient, especially when it comes to critical minerals, and cannot ignore conflictualities or the geopolitical dimension, or make the assumption that humans' propensity to fighting each other will miraculously disappear to enable an energy transition based on the best possible efficiency.
These considerations are a reminder of the need for transversal, transcultural and transdisciplinary approaches, and suggest that Cindynics should increase its focus on the three major dangers of the coming decades: hybrid warfare and disinformation, artificial intelligence, and global warming.