What will the World be like in 20 years?

By Tim McGuinness, Ph.D., DFin, MCPO, MAnth – Senior Fellow, Emeritus Council

In 2025, the international system and geopolitical landscape still looks familiar, but change is coming

For decades, the United States stood in guarded competition with Russia, China, and India while maintaining close ties with many democracies in Europe and the Pacific. However, in the years to come, the planet’s 4 great nations fully realized they all had a common threat.

Let’s jump forward 20 years and look back on changes that seem to be beginning in 2025, but come to fruition in 2045.

Assumptions:

  • Islam is talking over every country where it is not actively resisted.
  • Countries from Europe to Asia, Africa, and eventually even some South American countries will fall to Islam, including Canada.
  • We see these forces inside the United States, but resistance and cauterization is happening right now.
  • Most of Africa will convert from Christianity to Islam, as it has throughout the Middle East. Ethiopia will be a holdout, but eventually it will be overrun.
  • Most of Central Europe will be consumed, with holdout countries in the east and far north.
  • Within a generation, Islam will control half of the countries on the planet.
  • 4 of the 5 major powers are profoundly anti-Islam: the U.S., Russia, China, and India. Only Europe and the UK fully opened their doors and allowed their takeover.

A Possible Scenario

A Speculative Look at How It May Unfold

This balance fractured over the next decade as a transnational theocratic Islamist movement consolidated power across parts of Western Europe and the Middle East, absorbed key state institutions, and set shared doctrine above previous original national structures. Governments that fell into this orbit coordinated under Sharia law, imposing controls over every aspect of life. They took the name Theocratic Islamic Bloc.

In response, free states led by the United States, threatened by this model, began to close ranks. What started as ad hoc coordination hardened into a formal alliance that took the name FREEPAC. Its founding members were the United States and Russia, joined by India, Japan, both Koreas, Australia, New Zealand, Israel, Italy, Malta, and Croatia. Over the following years, the roster expanded to include Hungary, Poland, Switzerland, Slovenia, Bulgaria, Romania, Ukraine, Moldova, Finland, Norway, Iceland, Israel, Argentina, Chile, Mexico, and the Central American states except for Nicaragua, which aligned with the Islamists.

The turning points came quickly. After political turnovers in London and Paris in the early 2030s, loyalist military elements sailed segments of the British and French navy fleets to Atlantic holdings in the Caribbean and to the United States. Under joint United States and Russian pressure, all surviving European nuclear ballistic submarines were removed from service to prevent their capture. Weapon production facilities inside the former United Kingdom, France, and Germany were struck and dismantled, ending the manufacture of new warheads and delivery systems. Even so, the Theocratic Islamist Bloc retained intercontinental missiles captured from European stockpiles, which set a permanent nuclear shadow over the continent.

In the Middle East, a multi-year campaign ended with a unified theocratic Islamist administration across the Arabian Peninsula, that had its capital in Tehran, and included the countries of Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, the Sudans, the Horn of Africa, and Somalia. The new authorities fortified the Red Sea and eastern Mediterranean shores with anti-ship missiles and unmanned air systems.

In North Africa and the Sahel, aligned administrations extended the Islamist Bloc’s reach, virtually controlling most of the Mediterranean, and mass-moving fighters into Europe from the region.

Inside Western Europe, consumer demand collapsed as rationing and doctrinal controls replaced market signals. The European Union transformed into a Sharia Law regime. Most of the continent was unemployed and barely surviving, as Islamists imposed total control and executed vast numbers of LGBTQ Europeans, as well as anyone who resisted. This was quite different from the days of NAZI occupation, under this new authority, only devout muslims were safe.

The United States and its partners stopped treating these economies as buyers and restricted trade flows to the remaining free European states and to Russia. Supporting Poland, Hungary, Italy, Finland, and Norway as the remaining bastions of freedom in Europe.

Sea control and chokepoints moved to the center of strategy. The Theocratic Islamist Bloc gained the practical ability to close the Suez Canal to outside traffic. Its forces, including the captured remnants of British and French surface fleets, patrolled the eastern Mediterranean and sealed the strait from the inside. Gibraltar became a one-way gate. From the east, Bloc patrols enforced a stop on non-Bloc shipping, effectively stopping all Mediterranean commerce and shipping.. From the west, FREEPAC avoided entry to prevent incidents that could spiral. Turkey also became significantly more fundamentalist, and the Bosporus Strait was closed to outside vessels under a Bloc-aligned Ankara government, which isolated the Black Sea. Italy, Malta, and Croatia were the only free states left with Mediterranean ports, and they could be supplied only by overland routes and air-sea bridges that never touched Bloc waters. Israel remained free on the southeastern shore, protected by layered missile defense and integrated early warning tied to FREEPAC networks.

In maritime terms, the Cape route did not provide relief. As the Islamist Bloc extended coastal strike zones and long-range drones along eastern and southern Africa, commercial transits around the Cape of Good Hope became untenable. South Africa adopted policies of accommodation and was beginning to fail economically and politically after 2 decades of antagonism with the West.. Only a U.S. protected enclave in Cape Town remained available for limited depot work and humanitarian lift. Everything north of South Africa sat inside the Islamist Bloc’s reach. One exception stood out on the continent. Ghana accepted a full U.S. forward presence with Russian support. Tema and Takoradi became combined air and naval bases, depot hubs. A joint headquarters in Accra directed coastal defense, surveillance, and logistics for relief and selected operations. Ghana served as the only reliable Allied footprint on the West African coast.

In the Indian Ocean, India kept open waters south and west of the subcontinent. Access through Indonesian and Malaysian waters narrowed and closed to non-Bloc shipping, which forced Indian sea trade with Asia and the United States to skirt south of Australia. FREEPAC allied planners rewrote shipping plans. The Atlantic became the main ocean for commercial lift, and the Pacific held the other half of the lifeline. The underwater domain shifted decisively in favor of the Allies. The United States, Russia, China, and India combined seabed arrays, autonomous gliders, and passive acoustic curtains across Arctic gateways and the North and South Pacific. This made it far more difficult for Theocratic Islamist Bloc submarines to operate without detection and gave FREEPAC a dependable picture of traffic near critical corridors.

North America changed as well. After a series of cross-border terrorist attacks tied to Islamist Bloc-aligned actors in Canada, the United States, and its FREEPAC partners authorized a full continental barrier along the northern frontier. The build ran from 2035 to 2043. The design used layered fencing in accessible terrain, anti-vehicle trenches and berms in rugged areas, riverine nets across the Great Lakes arteries, counter-UAV towers, and aviation pads for rapid response. Legacy civil crossings closed. A handful of Secure Transit Gates allowed government-to-government transfers under strict screening. Great Lakes locks operated for domestic U.S. traffic only. At the same time, Canada aligned many of its governmental standards with the Islamist Bloc without joining it. Almost half of its cities now follow Sharia Law. This resulted in a massive refugee problem inside the United States when native Canadians fled the expansion of Islam.

This set of changes and alignment deepened U.S. concern over the Pacific flank. British Columbia and the Yukon were placed under U.S. military administration to deny the Bloc a base on the Pacific and to secure a continuous land corridor from the U.S. Midwest to Alaska. Earlier, in 2028, Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba had chosen to join the United States as states, which strengthened the inland route. Far to the northeast, Greenland joined the United States as a home rule territory after Denmark’s collapse, anchoring radar, missile warning, and seabed sensors across the Arctic, and being the gatekeeper for the new Northwest Passage, made possible with new joint Russian, Chinese, and American mega-icebreakers to keep the north open year-round. The U.S. also seized New Brunswick, Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island to secure the Eastern shipping channel from the Arctic. Nanavut became independent and a U.S. protectorate, thus encapsulating Canada.

With Suez shut, the Mediterranean sealed from the east, the Straits closed, and the Cape ruled out, FREEPAC needed a land alternative between North America and Asia. The answer was a sealed, high-speed, hyperloop freight-first corridor from the continental United States to Alaska, across the Bering to the Russian Far East, then on to Northeast China. Construction began in the mid-2040s. The backbone consisted of dual pressurized tubes for high-speed capsules, portals at Anchorage and in Chukotka, and a chain of depots through Magadan, Khabarovsk, and across the border into Heilongjiang. A sister project began to link Central Asia to northern India through deep-bore tunnels under the Trans-Himalaya. While these were being built, India used air and sea lifts routed south of Australia to keep commerce moving.

As the land bridge took shape, the FREEPAC allies added feeders. Finland and Norway built spurs to Lapland and the Norwegian coast, giving the corridor resilient Arctic access. Switzerland opened secured freight channels through the Alps, which linked Italy to Central/Eastern Europe without any reliance on Islamist Bloc waters. On the Adriatic, Slovenia and Croatia expanded Koper, Rijeka, and Split under layered air and missile defense. In Eastern Europe, sealed convoy corridors tied Poznań and Rzeszów to Lviv and Kyiv, and Bucharest to central Bulgaria, then onward to Moldova. These routes kept Ukraine and Moldova supplied even while the Black Sea remained closed.

Across the Atlantic, Argentina and Chile became the South Atlantic anchors, controlling the Straits of Magellin and the Southern Ocean for the Allies, since Brazil and Bolivia aligned with the Theocratic Islamist Bloc. Mexican ports on both coasts, along with Central America (except for Nicaragua), added staging, storage, and cross-isthmus lift. Cuba remained a Russian ally and granted access to Mariel and Havana for patrol, refueling, and signals tasks tied to FREEPAC operations.

Financial plumbing followed the new geography. FREEPAC partners launched a shared settlement grid that cleared payments in their major currencies and cryptocurrencies, and excluded Theocratic Islamist Bloc jurisdictions. Supply chains reorganized around the land bridge and Atlantic air-sea bridges. Firms prioritized high-value, low-mass cargo for the corridor, including semiconductors, medical goods, aerospace parts, and advanced batteries. Bulk energy and ore moved across the Allied Atlantic and Pacific instead of through blocked seas.

The Internet was split in two – the FREEPAC web, disconnected from the Islamist Bloc countries, saved it from continuous assault by the Bloc.

By the late 2030s, the political picture had hardened. The United Nations collapsed in 2030 after it was ejected from the United States by President Vance, and the U.S. stopped funding it. NATO dissolved after key members in Western Europe switched alignment or became unable to fulfill their obligations. The Continental Compact inside FREEPAC took shape across Central and Eastern Europe, first as a logistics and air defense corridor, then as a full security spine. The Washington–Novosibirsk Accord formalized U.S.–Russian military integration for corridor protection, early warning, and undersea surveillance. FREEPAC added Nordic members, which extended early warning across the GIUK gap and into the Barents approaches. Gibraltar remained a permanent flashpoint, yet FREEPAC never tried to force entry. Every remaining free Mediterranean port was supplied from the Atlantic side by air or overland routes. Israel lived under constant missile pressure but held steady through layered defense, partnerships, and hardened port shelters. Italy, Malta, and Croatia carried the weight of free access to the sea in the central basin. In addition, the United States established a permanent base in the former Gaza, which was finally cleared out in 2027.

The early 2040s cemented the new economic and military maps. The Theocratic Islamist Bloc issued the Port Said edicts that made outside access to the Suez Canal impossible. The Red Sea and eastern Mediterranean were filled with long-range anti-ship missiles and drone pickets. The Turkish Straits closure cut the Black Sea off from the world. The Cape route stayed off limits for normal commerce. Consumer markets in Islamist Bloc-ruled Western Europe never recovered. The Allies redirected industry toward their own networks. Energy and refining shifted to Atlantic-facing hubs in the United States, Argentina, and its neighbors. Underwater surveillance matured into a continuous field from the North Pacific through the Arctic gateways and down into the North and South Atlantic. This gave FREEPAC the confidence to run a land bridge in range of hostile missiles because any approach by hostile submarines would likely be detected early.

By 2045 the present reality looked set. The world stood divided between the Theocratic Islamist Bloc and FREEPAC. The Bloc controlled most of Western Europe, the Middle East, the Suez Canal, the Turkish Straits, and stretches of the Mediterranean coast. It also controlled most of Southern Asia and Africa, parts of Southeast Asia, and parts of South and North America. It commanded the captured remnants of European fleets and retained intercontinental missiles from European stockpiles. Its air forces and blue-water navies remained weak, but its road-mobile launchers and coastal missile belts could punish any misstep at sea. FREEPAC held the underwater domain, the Arctic and Antarctic rims, the Pacific gateways, and most of the Atlantic. It possessed a continuous land route from the American heartland to Asia, with spurs to the Nordics and secured passages through the Alps into Central and Eastern Europe. Ghana stood as the forward Allied footprint in West Africa, Cape Town as a guarded enclave at the continent’s southern edge.

Brazil aligned with the Islamist Bloc, so South Atlantic logistics concentrated in Argentina and Chile. Mexico and Central America, except Nicaragua, supplied Gulf and Pacific staging. Cuba remained a Russian ally and a useful hub for patrols and refueling. Greenland’s home rule under the United States gave FREEPAC a chain of Arctic bases and sensors that linked North America to Europe through the far north.

Risk did not disappear. The greatest concern was nuclear. The Theocratic Islamist Bloc’s possession of intercontinental missiles kept the temperature high, even as its aviation and sea power lagged. FREEPAC’s layered missile defense and early warning reduced some of the danger, yet every movement of mobile launchers near former European bases triggered alerts. Gibraltar, the Turkish Straits, the approaches to the Red Sea, and the edges of Bloc coastal missile zones remained places where a single mistake could have outsized consequences. The land bridge itself was a target for sabotage. For that reason the Allies hardened portals, buried energy storage, installed parallel fiber, and set response standards that measured minutes rather than hours.

Space became the FREEPAC’s private domain. The U.S. and Argentina seized the European spaceport in French Guiana, to deny it the Islamist Europe; and the combined 4-nation FREEPAC Space Command controlled the high ground completely. Ironically, just as humans built habitats on the Moon, and had a human landing on Mars, the world tumbled into a new and not-so-cold war.

Even so, by mid-2045 the system functioned. Goods moved by capsule from the American Midwest to Northeast China in a day. Air and sea lifts kept Italy, Malta, Croatia, the Nordics and Eastern Europe, and Israel supplied without touching Bloc waters. Eastern Europe’s corridor kept Ukraine and Moldova fed and armed while the Black Sea stayed closed. India policed the Indian Ocean lanes near its shores and routed its trade south of Australia to reach the Pacific and the U.S. West Coast. Consumer economies inside the Islamist Bloc remained stagnant or collapsed, which limited their leverage over global demand. The Allies concentrated on reliability, redundancy, and steady throughput rather than on speed at any cost.

This was survival over the long run.

That is the landscape now. The Theocratic Islamist Bloc holds the interior seas and chokepoints of the Old World, yet it cannot reach into the underwater domain or the Arctic corridor that FREEPAC commands. FREEPAC cannot reopen Suez, Gibraltar from the east, or the Turkish Straits, yet it does not need to. A different map now carries world commerce and power: north through Alaska and the Bering, east across the Arctic rim and Alpine galleries, south along the Adriatic gateway, and across the Atlantic to the only free harbors left in the Mediterranean. The risks are real and the margins are thin, but the system endures because the Allies built it to work without the seas the Islamist Bloc controls.

Is this real? Is it a projection of what might come?

We will leave it up to you to decide.