The question many are asking in December 2025 is whether there will finally be peace in Ukraine. But perhaps that is the wrong question, because even if an agreement emerges, imposed by Washington, accepted by Kiev and tolerated by Moscow, it is unlikely to be peace. It will be an unstable pause, conditioned by force and incapable of producing lasting security. And this is not an isolated case: it is the symptom of something bigger. We have entered the era of systemic vulnerability.
We live in a time when crises are no longer episodes: they are structures. War is simultaneously military, energy, financial, technological and informational. What begins in one territory has repercussions on others, without borders or fixed scales. Each regional conflict acts like an earthquake that displaces entire plates of the international system.
The war in Gaza made this evident. The conflict is not just local: it reshapes balances in the Middle East, weakens essential maritime corridors, alters global energy prices and fuels political radicalization in various latitudes. Every tactical decision has global strategic effects. As in Ukraine, the idea of “containing” the conflict is today an illusion.
Simultaneously, the Global South ceased to be a distant observer. He is a central, assertive actor who does not accept strategic frameworks designed in Washington or Brussels. India, Brazil, South Africa, Indonesia or Turkey move with their own logic, redefine alliances and contest historical hierarchies. This multipolar voice doesn’t want to choose sides: it wants to choose conditions. And this increases the unpredictability of the system, at the same time as it reveals the European difficulty in projecting influence in a world where power is redistributed and fragmented.
In this context, Europe has been slow, reactive and, at times, absent. It was not up to the times in responding to Russian aggression, it was slow to define a coherent position on Gaza or the Middle East and it maintained an excessively Eurocentric reading of what are today the major global alignments. There is a lack of integrated vision and a lack of agility: two critical elements in the era of total interdependence.
And this is where the real question arises: are we prepared for a world in which both peace and war spill over borders? Where security depends not just on tanks or treaties, but on the stability of electrical grids, access to chips, the protection of submarine cables, financial resilience and the ability to mitigate disinformation on a large scale?
The vulnerability is systemic because the systems are all linked. Gaza affects the Indo-Pacific; Ukraine affects global energy; the Global South affects the political balance in international institutions. The architecture of the world has become sensitive to each impact and each impact triggers many others.
The era of systemic vulnerability is not a destiny, but a warning. Either we build a new model of resilience, European and global, based on capacity, speed, interoperability and strategic vision, or we will continue to live in a time where each crisis is always the prelude to the next. The choice is still ours.