There is something unsettling about the way catastrophe now arrives. Not with sirens, not with spectacle, but with spreadsheets, policy briefs, and phrases like ‘geoeconomic confrontation’. The language is clean. Bloodless. Efficient. And yet, buried inside it is a warning that countries like Pakistan understand instinctively, because we have lived it before: the world is reorganising itself, and it is doing so without us in mind.

The World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report 2026, recently published, describes this moment as the ‘Age of Competition’. It sounds almost athletic, as if nations are merely racing, not wrestling. But competition between unequal players is not a race. It is a reckoning. For emerging economies, it is the moment when the rules change mid-game, and the referees leave the field.

The report indicates that the greatest short-term risk to the world is no longer climate collapse, pandemics, or even war itself, but rather geoeconomic confrontation. Sanctions. Trade barriers. Weaponised supply chains. Capital controls. Economic tools repurposed as instruments of punishment and dominance. For powerful nations, these are levers. For countries like Pakistan, they are chokeholds.

We are told this is about ‘national security’.

But whose security?

Certainly not the security of the millions who live one fuel hike, one flood, one........

© The Friday Times