- Nuclear weapons development, specifically targeted at the US
- Trade Tariffs
- Improper security classification in the whitehouse
- Israel, Iran threatening war
- China becomes a dictatorship
Feels like we're going backward in time for some reason.
This attitude assumes the linear progression of conventional warfare that existed among humans until the 20th century. A large scale nuclear exchange will be the end of us all.
Russia goes into Belarus or Ukraine, maybe Kazakhstan. If you're a dictator like Putin and you can't expand your economy organically, you eventually try to do it through invasion.
China will go after Taiwan sooner than later. In another ten years they'll be close enough to parity with the US to likely do it and have the odds strongly in their favor of safely getting away with it.
The mess in the middle east will continue. There's still a high risk the US ends up at war with Iran, whether drawn in by Israel or otherwise. Saudi Arabia wants to become a nuclear nation. Both Saudi and Iran are practically guaranteed to reach for nuclear weapons in the coming decade or two. Saudi will want to get themselves positioned technologically in case Iran goes for that.
Japan will probably begin/continue gradually re-arming.
The major nuclear powers will go on a nuclear weapon upgrade spree, in competition with each other. That has already begun. China's moves there will be very interesting, given their (supposedly) relatively small arsenal.
We'll very likely see the US, China and Russia deploy weapons to space. That'll add to the tensions.
In fact, one major reason for the post-WWII institutions such as the UN, EU (then called something else), and others was to prevent another war. One major reason for preventing war (there are lots of good ones!) cited by leaders was that the technology of destruction had improved to such a point that another war could devastate civilization - that was over 70 years ago.
I don't see a good argument that globalism (as we knew it) was going to continue perpetually, that there would be no inflection occurance. It makes perfect sense that a trend like that would have an inflection and go the other direction eventually.
The technological leap that I'd expect, will begin to accelerate as the tension between large nations builds over the next decade. It's clear there will be a big competition between the powers in the form of an AI race for example (already underway), and it won't stop there. There's a very large gap between Cold War style conflicts coming back into commonality, or even moving a bit beyond that, and everybody deciding to commit nuclear suicide and kill each other.