In 2025, the world looks more and more like a 19th century chessboard, on which three elderly leaders move pawns according to logic that seemed to have been archived with the end of the Cold War.

Donald Trump, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin – at the head of the three major global superpowers – seem to share a vision of international politics based on the division of spheres of influence, the primacy of force and an ‘imperial’ conception of power. Not a multilateral order, but a concert between great ones, in which the strongest decide and the others suffer.

Twentieth-century political canons in the century of interconnections

History, however, never repeats itself: today this worldview is grafted onto a radically different context: interconnected, technological, fragile. And it is here that an often underestimated problem emerges: the generational problem.

Trump (born 1946), Putin (born 1952) and Xi (born 1953) belong to a generation that grew up politically in the 20th century, shaped by cold wars, opposing blocs, raw materials as a lever of power and borders as lines to be defended or moved. It is inevitable that age, even more than age, conditions one’s view of the world: a view that tends to read the complexity of the 21st century with 19th and 20th century categories. States as empires, resources as booty, alliances as temporary and revocable instruments.

The result is a muscular foreign policy, little inclined to the synthesis of ideal and pragmatism, and above all incapable of speaking to the new generations, who live in a world marked by: climate crisis, energy transition, artificial intelligence, global value chains and unconventional threats. The real void is not only of power, but of emerging leadership: figures capable of holding together vision and realism, principles and interests, without slipping into either cynicism orutopia.

Chinese realpolitik

Within this framework, the differences between the three leaders are real and significant, especially when comparing the US and China. Xi Jinping, while leading an authoritarian and repressive system, shows a strategic foresight that goes beyond the short term. China has long understood that oil, besides being a finite resource, is also a geopolitical vulnerability. This is why Beijing invests heavily in renewable energy, power grids, electric cars, batteries, rare earths and green infrastructure. This is not ecological idealism: it is 21st century realpolitik. Reducing energy dependence means reducing exposure to blackmail and increasing strategic autonomy.

The obsolete categories of Trumpian power politics

On the contrary, the Trump administration’s approach appears anchored in a regressive vision. The centrality of oil returns as a geopolitical obsession, to the point of justifying new tensions and conflicts in already unstable areas. Even the ‘war on drug trafficking’ is reinterpreted with obsolete categories, as if the global drug problem were still cocaine and as if the centre of gravity were South America. In the meantime, the real emergency is called fentanyl: a synthetic, devastating drug that does not originate in plantations but in chemical laboratories and global industrial supply chains. Fighting it with 1980s conceptual tools means fighting the shadow of a problem that no longer exists, leaving the real one intact.

Putin’s Terran conception

Putin, for his part, embodies perhaps the most classic form of this imperial vision: territories, borders, buffer zones, direct military influence . A policy that looks to history as legitimisation and to the future as a threat. Here too, political age weighs more than biological age: Putin’s Russia fights tomorrow’s world with yesterday’s maps.

And Europe? This is where the game becomes decisive

Because if the world is treated like a table set by the ‘big three’, there is a real risk that Europe will end up on the menu. And this in spite of an often ignored fact: in 2025 Europe, considered as a continent and not only as the European Union, remains the world’s largest market and, according to various estimates, has shown an economic growth capacity superior to that of the United States. An economic giant, but still a political and strategic dwarf.

European fragility is aggravated byuncertainty over the NATO umbrella. The Trump administration’s attitude, oscillating between disengagement and blackmail, has made an uncomfortable truth clear: European security cannot depend forever on the mood of American domestic politics. Even the most solid alliance can crumble if it is emptied of trust.

Hence the urgency of a new European institutional formula

Not necessarily a classic federation, but a more agile structure, capable of rapid decision-making and real integration on defence, foreign policy, strategic industry and energy. A model that could take its cue from the so-called ‘coalition of the willing’: a nucleus of European countries – EU and non-EU, including the UK – ready to move forward together without being held back by crossed vetoes.

It is not a question of opposing the big ones, but of ceasing to be the object of their negotiations. In a world changing at dizzying speed, standing still is tantamount to choosing decline. Europe has the economic, human and cultural resources to be an autonomous pole. What it still lacks is leadership that is up to the times: not nostalgic, not imperial, but finally adult.

Read also:

Please continue to underestimate Europe by saying it is weak – E.Pinelli; L’Europeista

The bad company of the old EU and the construction of the new Europe – C.Palma; L’Europeista