The period we live in is characterized by big changes, often made implicitely, in policies. Everyone is rearming again, many countries are also rehabilitating the strategic state. To this extend it is necessary to figure out the fact that we are back to conflicts linked to the mastery of science. The one who will master the new technologies will dominate the world (Putin said in 2017 for instance that « the country who will dominate artificial intelligence will dominate the world »). This concerns military issues also : marine, airplanes, but also space to a bigger extend than before.
The situation we live in is not far from the situation before the 1st world war. However there many secret forces that go beyond this issue. But if we have a philosophical look of this process, this conflict can concern a lot of fields : philosophy of history, political philosophy, economics (if we take economical thinking as part of philosophy) or philosophy of science.
If we compare with the last phase that surrounded September 11, we can say that it was an ideological war. Today we can say that there is a huge impact of this approach. First a country like China has remarkably succeeded to educate a large amount of people and fight efficiently poverty this way. Then they first focused on economical development, and today they target to become the most powerful scientist country. This phase has been followed by Germany in the end of the 19th century. The trap of Thucydide is a period we live in. It is in fact very classical, as there has been many fights between the rising power and the declining one. But international relations are today a big chess game, even more than before.
Anyway we can see that China adopted a mix of confucean philosophy in its approach and the reformative economical views. Those include a mix between entrepreneurship and a stratege state, an important focus on education, and of course a fight to acquire as much knowledge as possible (by theft a lot of time), that in the long run allowed the country to play to the same level as Western countries.
Those factors show that we are back to a period that existed in history before with the fight between France and England, England and Germany… This chess (or go) game will be long and have a very important impact in the future.
The observer 