The emerging geopolitical risks for the rest of 2024

The remaining six months of 2024 are crucial to international peace, as  the global population of 8,118,835,999 people struggle to survive the imminent dangers of wars, climate change, and impending pestilence and famine, while global powers like Russia, China, and the US continue to threaten us all with the risk of World War III.

According to Wikipedia, geopolitics is the art and science that deal with the study of international relations, including emerging alliances and axes of powers, polarizing rivalries in military supremacy, economic competitions, and recurrent conflicts in political ideologies and principles that impact the lives of nations and peoples. Contemporary commentators on geopolitics today are deconstructing classic political theories and building new concepts and ideologies that  are made imperative by emerging technologies and changing socio-economic and political landscapes.

Writer Christopher Gogwill had been cited to invent such terms as pseudoscience of new political geography and alternative geographic determinism. Top of mind today are the following trends that shall determine the immediate, medium-term, and long-term  horizon of the world's political, military, economic, social, and technological future: first is the US-China rivalry in the Asia-Pacific Basin, including the South China Sea and the West Philippine Sea issues. Second is the Russia-NATO tension exacerbated by the war in Ukraine, and third is Israel's wars against Hamas and Hezbollah.

The fourth risk that the world is facing today is cyber attacks as the terrorists' new weapon of mass destruction. Can you imagine the tremendous damage that can be inflicted on America if Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, or Kim Jong Un can access the records of the Pentagon and CIA? In a smaller but more dangerous scale, if Beijing can hack the records of the US and the Philippine military top secret data.

It has been reported in digital media that cyberattacks are becoming more and more frequent and increasingly serious that entire governments can fall and the world peace can be put in danger. This has happened to Philippine records when various government agencies had been victimized, thus exposing us to constant invasions of our privacy, and threats to national security.

The last but perhaps the most difficult nut to crack is climate change. The persistent risks of natural calamities and disasters driven by climate change has been with us for ages. But people never learn. Millions of lives and trillions in dollars worth of properties have been lost. Extreme weather disruptions, species extinctions, rising sea levels are all pushing economies of smaller nations to the edge of famine, hunger, and extreme poverty. But as this topic is being discussed in global fora, the blame game continues to polarize nations in the UN, NATO, EU, even in ASEAN and among the BRICS and other regional and global alliances.

The Philippines is in the center of multiple hazards brought about by wars, calamities, cyberattacks, and terrorism. What is the government's overall strategy to save the 117 million Filipinos from being annihilated from the face of the earth?