Stephen Brawer is the chairman of the Belt and Road Institute in Sweden and a distinguished research fellow of the Guangdong Institute for International Strategies. The article was originally published on CGTN.
The ultimate trajectory for humanity in the coming year 2026 still belongs to the great unknown. The complexity of world affairs and international relations between nations remains full of uncertainty. Yet, as the people of the world look forward to 2026, the vision expressed by China’s President Xi Jinping in his New Year’s Speech to the Chinese People can be seen as a guiding star for a better future for everyone. As 2025 concludes, the success of China’s 14th Five-Year Plan is marked by both rapid development in new quality productive forces and increasing scientific innovation in virtually all areas of research and development. This includes pioneering steps in space travel and development as well as unprecedented breakthroughs in fusion technology, an energy source for humanity that will supply virtually unlimited clean and energy intensive power for thousands of years. The age of digital technology and progress in artificial intelligence have provided mankind with robotics and information tools completely unique in human history. In light of these increasing discoveries and potential, the future looks very bright. China’s policy of emphasizing opening-up markets to expand both domestic and international trade has provided a firm foundation for real economic growth and upgrading infrastructure and industrial modernization globally. This continues the Belt and Road Initiative as the framework for cooperation and peaceful development with the ultimate goal of eliminating global poverty. The planning and formulating of the coming 15th Five-Year Plan will continue the improvements achieved in the 14th Five-Year Plan with the vision and expectations of the essential goal of improving life for all citizens and the happiness of their families and their posterity.
In a world shaped by cooperation and friendship between peoples and nations, such outstanding developments and unique historical improvements for any civilization would be welcomed by all. Such a spirit can certainly be hoped for and worked for in 2026.
Yet, unfortunately, reality is still far from such an inspiring vision. Geopolitical tensions, sanctions, conflict and war remain a terrible reminder that humanity has not yet risen above the level of the beasts and the so called “law of the jungle.” Rather than embracing the rise of China as a great step forward for all mankind, there are those primitive forces which wish to continue geopolitical blocks and conflicts. The United States New National Security Strategy Document, although it points in the direction of ending the role of NATO, and military escalation and expansion in Europe, with the war in Ukraine, it endorses a clear containment strategy directed against China. The recent revival of a militarist strategy in Japan by Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi and expansion of AUKUS show the old colonial order or unipolar world wishes to resort to a new strategy of tension. This includes the decision by the US to sell the largest amount of military equipment to Taiwan in history and abandon the 1982 U.S.–China Joint Communiqué, to reduce arms sales to Taiwan instead of increasing them.
Of perhaps even greater significance the Editor of Foreign Affairs, Dan Kurtz-Phelan, sent out an email on December 20th with the subject line: “The Return of Total War.” That was the title of an article published in Foreign Affairs the year before on October 24, 2024, which the editor urged everyone to read again. Foreign Affairs is the magazine of the CFR, Council on Foreign Relations, which was established in 1921 as the “sister think tank” to the Chatham House, Royal Institute of International Affairs, these two institutions being the elite think tanks in the US and Europe pushing the trumpets of war. The promoted article was subtitled “Understanding and Preparing for a New Era of Comprehensive Conflict.”
These Warhawks and Provocateurs are still a very clear and present danger to humanity’s future in 2026.
As a European and as Chairman of the Belt and Road Institute in Sweden, it is my firm commitment and stance to promote and elaborate the strategic solution for avoiding this drive for conflict and war. The Belt and Road Initiative, and BRICS, together with the Global South define the Strategic Alternative which will combine economic cooperation and security agreements which will lighten the pathway to a world built upon a “community with a shared future for mankind.” The challenges will be great and will require a combination of hard work and deeper understanding between cultures and civilizations. The proposed Initiatives of China’s President Xi Jinping for the Global Development Initiative, the Global Security Initiative, the Global Civilization Initiative and the Global Governance Initiative provide clear international leadership and policy direction from China.
Yet what remains as a vital and necessary part of the solution is a revival of the European Renaissance thinking that is virtually nonexistent in today’s Western civilization and its present political leadership. These ideas are most clearly assessable in the thinking of the great renaissance thinker Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. It is here that the foundation for Physical Economy emerged. This means a foundation built upon wealth in the form of improved living standards and productivity through technological innovation. The essence of this economic thinking is the goal to promote the common good of the people. It is achieved through real production and development whereby money and credit play a subsidiary role to genuine physical progress and development. This could be called “Belt and Road Economics.”
Secondly, Leibniz developed a working idea of “Natural Law” whereby justice and wisdom are achieved because of the innate goodness of the human being in a harmonic relationship to the physical universe. Leibniz called this “a preestablished harmony.” There is an acute need to elevate the entire nature of international political relations and discussion to a level whereby these profound but essential ideas and thinking become the primary substance of political dialogue and debate. This is ultimately how to achieve successful cooperation and peace between civilizations and putting a permanent end to geopolitics and the bestial law of the jungle mentality.