Paris (Imran Y. CHOUDHRY) :- Former Press Secretary to the President, Former Press Minister to the Embassy of Pakistan to France, Former MD, SRBC Mr. Qamar Bashir analysis : Mark Carney’s remarkable address at Davos earlier this year was more than a Canadian response to a changing world. It amounted to an intellectual challenge to the assumptions upon which much of the post-war international system was built.
His central proposition was unsettling: the world is experiencing not merely a transition but a “rupture,” in which great powers like the United States increasingly use tariffs, finance, supply chains and economic integration as instruments of leverage. Countries that continue believing accommodation will automatically purchase security may therefore be living inside what Carney called a “pleasant fiction.”
For decades, Europe, Asia, the Middle East and many developing countries organized significant parts of their security and economic policies around an American-led international system. The problem was not the partnership itself. The danger arose when partnership became dependency, dependency encouraged complacency, and complacency was mistaken for permanent security.
Europe offers perhaps the clearest warning. For decades it relied heavily upon American military power while concentrating its own resources on economic and social development. Yet Washington is now explicitly pressing Europeans to assume greater responsibility for defending their continent. More dramatically, European governments were confronted with American pressure over Greenland and tariff threats against allies that resisted Washington’s position. Britain publicly called such tariffs against allies “wrong,” while European leaders insisted that Denmark and Greenland’s sovereignty was non-negotiable.
This is precisely the kind of contradiction Carney wants middle powers to recognize. An alliance can remain valuable without being treated as an insurance policy against every future contingency. Friendship between states is ultimately governed by interests, and interests change.
Canada learned the same lesson with exceptional severity. Few relationships appeared more permanent than that between Canada and the United States. Their economies became deeply integrated, their defense structures intertwined and their border one of the most economically consequential in the world. Yet Canada is currently confronting substantial American tariffs and escalating commercial confrontation. In August, Washington imposed 50% tariffs on roughly $20 billion of Canadian goods after negotiations failed; Canada subsequently prepared equivalent retaliation.
Carney’s response has therefore been not to sever relations with America but to reduce Canada’s vulnerability to any single relationship. Canada is seeking new trade arrangements, investing in strategic industries and building coalitions with other middle powers. His government says Canada is pursuing links between the European Union and the Trans-Pacific partnership that could encompass 1.5 billion people.
The lesson travels far beyond the Atlantic. Middle Eastern states historically dependent upon American security guarantees must also reassess what sovereignty requires in an era when regional wars, sanctions and great-power confrontation can impose enormous costs upon countries that did not design those conflicts.
Pakistan and many developing economies face a different vulnerability. Their dependence may be financial rather than military: external financing, international institutions, export markets, technology, energy or foreign investment can narrow the space available for genuinely independent decision-making. The larger truth is more important: excessive dependence on any external center of power creates leverage, and leverage can eventually become coercion.
Here China provides an instructive contrast, though not a flawless model. China spent decades building the economic, industrial, technological and military foundations that allow it to negotiate with Washington from a fundamentally different position. It developed enormous manufacturing capacity, infrastructure, foreign-exchange resources, technological capabilities and increasingly sophisticated armed forces. It did not achieve autonomy by isolating itself; paradoxically, it used global integration to accumulate national strength.
Consequently, when Washington pressures Beijing, China possesses instruments with which to respond. It means sovereignty becomes more credible when backed by capability.
Iran demonstrates another, much harsher version of strategic autonomy. Whatever judgment one makes about its government or policies, decades of sanctions and confrontation forced Tehran to develop a considerable capacity to operate without the degree of Western economic and security integration enjoyed by many regional states. The costs to Iranian society have been substantial. Yet its experience illustrates the same principle from another direction: independence has a price, but dependence carries risks of its own.
The objective for other countries should therefore not be to become China or Iran. Nor should they simply replace Washington with Beijing. Changing masters is not strategic autonomy.
The real objective should be diversified sovereignty. A country that depends upon one state for defense, another single market for exports, one financial network for transactions, imported energy for survival and foreign technology for critical infrastructure possesses formal sovereignty but limited strategic freedom.
Carney captures this brutally when describing middle powers negotiating individually with a hegemon: they negotiate from weakness, compete to become the most accommodating and eventually perform sovereignty while accepting subordination. That observation should resonate across Asia, Africa and the Middle East.
Countries must begin measuring national strength differently. Military capability matters, but so do food security, energy, technological capacity, industrial production, critical minerals, financial resilience, educated human capital and diversified trade. A nation unable to feed itself, fuel itself or defend itself, Carney warns, has few options when international rules cease protecting it.
Building these capabilities inevitably demands sacrifice. Governments must invest in education, research, infrastructure, domestic manufacturing, energy, agriculture, artificial intelligence and defense. They must mobilize their human resources instead of allowing talent to remain underdeveloped. Above all, citizens must understand that sovereignty cannot indefinitely be outsourced while independence is simultaneously expected.
But no middle power can realistically reproduce the scale of China or the United States. That is why Carney’s second prescription is as important as the first: middle powers must combine their strength.
His memorable warning that countries absent from the negotiating table risk finding themselves “on the menu” captures the predicament perfectly. Great powers possess the markets, militaries and financial leverage to act alone. Most other states do not. Their answer must therefore be coalitions—on trade, technology, critical minerals, energy, finance, maritime security and defense—constructed around common interests rather than blind allegiance.
This is where his invocation of Václav Havel acquires extraordinary relevance. Systems of domination survive not simply because the powerful impose them but because others participate in rituals they privately know to be false. Carney’s metaphorical instruction to middle powers is therefore to stop performing the ritual—to “take the sign out of the window.” The wiser conclusion is: never make another country indispensable to your survival.
Donald Trump’s transactional approach has merely made this structural reality harder to ignore. Alliances, markets and security guarantees remain useful, but none substitutes for national capability. Protection granted by another power can be renegotiated; market access can be restricted; financial infrastructure can become leverage; yesterday’s strategic assumption can become tomorrow’s vulnerability.
The choice confronting middle powers is therefore not between America and China, East and West, submission and isolation. It is between dependency and strategic autonomy.
Build strength at home. Diversify abroad. Cooperate with others without surrendering decision-making. Defend international law consistently. Develop citizens capable of accepting the costs of genuine independence. And never confuse the favor of the powerful with permanent security.
That is the deeper significance of Carney’s speech. The era in which countries could outsource their strategic destiny and call the resulting comfort sovereignty is fading. The nations that recognize this early will endure the rupture with dignity. Those that continue competing for the favor of great powers may eventually discover the cruelest truth of international politics:
A security umbrella belongs to the country holding the umbrella—and it can close it whenever it chooses.

Paris (Imran Y. CHOUDHRY) :- Former Press Secretary to the President, Former Press Minister to the Embassy of Pakistan to France, Former MD, SRBC Mr. Qamar Bashir analysis : Human civilization has always been built around struggle. People have labored to secure food, shelter and safety. They have pursued education, endured hardship and developed skills not only to survive, but also to gain dignity, recognition and self-actualization. Alongside this material journey has run a spiritual one: the search for meaning and purpose beyond physical comfort. For most people, however, earning a livelihood has consumed the greater part of life.
Elon Musk now asks us to imagine a radical departure from that history. In a recent conversation with Joe Rogan, he described a “benign scenario” in which artificial intelligence and robotics generate sustainable abundance and a “universal high income.” Work would become optional, poverty could disappear, and every person could have access to excellent medical care and virtually all desired goods and services. Rogan called it an ideal socialist utopia—ironically produced not by a workers’ revolution, but by advanced capitalist technology.
The idea sounds extraordinary, yet its underlying logic is simple. If intelligent machines can perform most physical and cognitive tasks faster, more accurately and at lower cost than human beings, the productive capacity of the economy could expand enormously. Humanoid robots could work in factories, construct roads and buildings, handle cargo at ports, cultivate farms, drive vehicles, maintain infrastructure and perform dangerous jobs without fatigue. AI systems could manage offices, logistics, design, accounting and countless other digital operations.
Musk has argued that highly productive robots could multiply economic output many times over. Operating around the clock, they could produce more food, housing, medicine and consumer goods at lower cost. Human beings would no longer need to exhaust themselves merely to put food on the table. A singer could devote life to music, a researcher to discovery, a parent to family, and a spiritually inclined person to reflection and service. Work might continue, but as a choice rather than a condition of survival.
This is the attractive face of sustainable abundance. It could also reduce many social pressures associated with deprivation. Financial desperation contributes to theft, exploitation and some forms of violence. Safer autonomous transport could sharply reduce accidents caused by fatigue, intoxication and human error. Precision agriculture and automated supply systems could limit waste and improve food security. Competition over scarce resources, a recurring source of domestic conflict and international rivalry, might also become less intense.
But technology does not distribute its own benefits. That is the decisive weakness in every effortless version of this dream. A billion robots may produce unprecedented wealth, but who will own the robots, the AI models, the energy systems and the data on which they depend? If ownership remains concentrated among a handful of corporations and technologically dominant countries, abundance at the level of production could coexist with extreme scarcity for everyone else. Factories can overflow with goods while people remain poor if they lack income, entitlement or political power.
Universal high income, therefore, cannot arise from automation alone. It would require a new social contract governing ownership and distribution. Citizens might receive an AI dividend, hold shares in national automation funds, or gain guaranteed access to housing, healthcare, education, energy and digital services. Tax systems may have to shift from labor toward the returns generated by automated capital. Otherwise, workers could lose wages and purchasing power long before abundance becomes broad enough to rescue them.
Musk himself has warned that the transition may involve considerable trauma and disruption. Digital and office-based occupations are especially exposed because AI can already perform many computer-based tasks, while complex physical work will generally take longer to automate. The road to a post-work society may therefore pass through unemployment, anxiety and political instability. Promising eventual prosperity will not satisfy families who lose their livelihoods during the transition. Governments must prepare protections before disruption reaches its full force, not after social damage has become irreversible.
There is also the profound question of meaning. Employment is not merely a mechanism for paying bills. It provides routine, identity, community and a sense of contribution. Freedom from compulsory labor could release immense creativity, but it could also produce loneliness and purposelessness if society fails to develop new sources of belonging. Education would have to shift from preparing people for jobs toward cultivating judgment, creativity, character and civic responsibility. Human worth must no longer be measured by salary, yet neither should passive consumption become the purpose of life.
Nor would abundance automatically eliminate crime, war, government or courts. Human conflict is driven not only by material need, but also by power, ideology, fear, jealousy, identity and ambition. Even a wealthy world would need institutions to protect rights, settle disputes and prevent powerful actors from controlling technology against the public interest. AI may improve administration, but handing all authority to algorithms could create surveillance and domination rather than freedom. Human judgment, democratic accountability and law would remain essential.
The greatest danger is that the developing world may enter this new age as a customer rather than a participant. Countries such as Pakistan, India and Bangladesh, along with nations across Africa, Asia and Latin America, cannot afford to watch from the sidelines while others control the infrastructure of intelligence. They must invest urgently in education, computing capacity, reliable energy, robotics, research and local-language AI. They should also cooperate regionally, share scientific resources and negotiate international rules that prevent a permanent technological caste system between nations.
Sustainable abundance is therefore neither fantasy nor destiny. AI and robotics may make it technically possible to liberate humanity from much of its compulsory labor, but only political wisdom can make that liberation universal. The real challenge is not simply teaching machines to produce more. It is ensuring that the wealth they produce belongs, in some meaningful measure, to all humanity.
Musk’s vision of sustainable abundance should therefore be welcomed not as a fool’s dream, but as a serious and achievable direction for humanity. It comes from no ordinary dreamer, but from an innovator who has repeatedly transformed seemingly impossible ideas into working realities—from electric vehicles and autonomous mobility to reusable rockets, space exploration and Starlink’s global communications network.
His record does not guarantee that every prediction will materialize exactly as imagined, but it gives the world compelling reason to take this vision seriously. Rather than resisting it or dismissing it with competing speculation, governments, scientists and technology leaders should study what Musk has achieved, invest in their own innovators and create many more minds capable of pursuing equally audacious solutions.
If this endeavor gathers global momentum, AI, robotics and sustainable energy could help build a cleaner and more peaceful world—one with less poverty, crime, conflict and competition over scarce resources, and with greater space for creativity, family, service and spiritual growth. Humanity should not fear such a future; it should begin preparing, cooperating and innovating to make sustainable abundance a shared reality for present and coming generations.

Paris (Imran Y. CHOUDHRY) :- Former Press Secretary to the President, Former Press Minister to the Embassy of Pakistan to France, Former MD, SRBC Mr. Qamar Bashir analysis : For more than a century, global economic and geopolitical power has revolved around energy. Coal powered industrialization; oil transformed transportation, warfare and international commerce; natural gas became another artery of modern civilization. Control of these resources—and the routes carrying them—created fortunes, alliances, dependencies and conflicts.
China’s rapidly advancing nuclear-fusion program now raises an extraordinary possibility: technology may eventually loosen the relationship between energy, geography and geopolitical power.
Its celebrated “artificial sun” refers to experimental fusion machines designed to reproduce the fundamental process that powers stars. But China’s recent achievements are remarkable enough without exaggeration. They demonstrate that fusion is moving progressively from theoretical physics toward an immensely difficult engineering challenge—and potentially, one day, toward electricity generation.
The scale of that challenge is illustrated by China’s enormous new superconducting fusion magnet. The toroidal-field magnet weighs approximately 582 tonnes and measures about 21 metres by 12 metres. Its function is extraordinary: creating the magnetic environment necessary for controlling plasma at temperatures no ordinary physical container could withstand. Chinese scientific authorities say its magnetic-energy storage capability substantially exceeds that of the comparable ITER system.
The apparent contradiction at the heart of fusion engineering is astonishing. Plasma must reach temperatures of tens or even hundreds of millions of degrees, while superconducting magnetic systems operate at extremely low cryogenic temperatures. Scientists must therefore maintain one of the hottest environments humanity can create extraordinarily close to some of its coldest engineered equipment, while preventing either environment from destroying the other.
The magnets create what can be imagined as an invisible cage. Fusion plasma consists of electrically charged particles, which respond to powerful magnetic fields. Instead of attempting to build a material wall capable of directly containing such temperatures—something impossible with existing materials—the tokamak uses magnetic confinement to keep most of the plasma separated from the reactor walls.
China’s EAST—Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak—has already demonstrated the importance of long-duration confinement. In January 2025, EAST maintained high-confinement plasma for 1,066 seconds, or 17 minutes and 46 seconds, breaking its previous 403-second record. The achievement did not produce commercial electricity, but it demonstrated progress toward one of fusion’s essential requirements: sustaining controlled, high-performance plasma for increasingly long periods.
China followed this with another significant development in August 2026. EAST researchers experimentally accessed a theorized “density-free regime,” maintaining stable plasma at densities beyond conventional limits. Density matters enormously because useful fusion requires enough fuel particles to interact, yet increasing plasma density has historically created instability problems. Overcoming that constraint could provide another pathway toward the conditions required for fusion ignition. citeturn0search1
China is now attempting to connect these scientific achievements with engineering. Its next-generation Burning Plasma Experimental Superconducting Tokamak, BEST, is scheduled for completion by the end of 2027.
According to the Chinese Academy of Sciences, BEST is intended to conduct deuterium-tritium burning-plasma experiments targeting 20–200 megawatts of fusion power and net energy gain. China is therefore moving beyond merely producing extremely hot plasma toward attempting to demonstrate whether fusion can become an energy-producing system.
This progression is no longer isolated from national economic planning. China’s 15th Five-Year Plan, covering 2026–2030, identifies nuclear fusion among the future industries Beijing intends to cultivate alongside quantum technology, hydrogen, biomanufacturing, artificial intelligence-related technologies and 6G. Fusion is therefore increasingly being approached not merely as laboratory research but as a potential future industrial sector. citeturn0search10
China did not begin this journey alone. Its early superconducting tokamak experience benefited from Soviet technology, including the T-7 machine transferred and reconstructed as HT-7 during the 1990s. But China used that foundation to develop domestic expertise in superconducting magnets, plasma physics, cryogenics, materials, diagnostics and precision engineering. What began partly through technology acquisition has evolved into an increasingly indigenous scientific and manufacturing ecosystem.
China is also not alone in the global fusion race. The United States has pursued laser-driven inertial confinement at the National Ignition Facility while American laboratories and private companies simultaneously pursue magnetic-confinement systems. Europe, Japan, South Korea, India and Russia remain deeply involved in fusion research, while ITER represents a vast multinational effort. Fusion is consequently becoming a technological competition involving several different scientific pathways. This competition could ultimately prove more consequential than competition for another oilfield.
Modern strategic geography rests heavily upon fossil fuels. The Persian Gulf, Strait of Hormuz, pipelines crossing Eurasia, LNG terminals and maritime transportation routes possess enormous importance because interruption of energy supplies can cripple economies. Major powers therefore devote military, diplomatic and financial resources to protecting access to energy and the routes through which it moves.
Commercial fusion could gradually change this equation. If countries eventually become capable of manufacturing enormous quantities of reliable electricity domestically from fusion, their dependence upon distant oilfields and vulnerable transportation corridors would decline. Hormuz and other chokepoints would remain important to world trade, but their capacity to threaten the entire global energy system could diminish.
The greatest economic shock would fall upon countries heavily dependent upon hydrocarbons. Governments whose budgets, exports and foreign-exchange earnings rely substantially upon oil and gas would confront declining demand and potentially lower prices. Those that convert today’s petroleum wealth into education, technology, manufacturing and diversified investment could survive and prosper. Those that remain overwhelmingly dependent upon extracting hydrocarbons could face profound structural adjustment.
If fusion eventually becomes reliable and economical, inexpensive electricity could power massive desalination plants, produce hydrogen and synthetic fuels, electrify transportation and industrial processes, support cleaner steel production, operate enormous AI data centers and potentially enable large-scale carbon removal. Instead of humanity simply dividing today’s energy market differently, the total amount of useful energy available to civilization could expand dramatically.
For developing countries, that could be transformational. Energy poverty restricts industry, agriculture, healthcare, education, water availability and technological progress. Abundant electricity could remove one of the most persistent constraints upon economic development and provide poorer societies opportunities that historically required access to coal, oil or gas.
In a fusion age, strategic advantage could increasingly belong to countries possessing scientific talent, superconducting technology, advanced materials, artificial intelligence, plasma-control expertise, precision manufacturing and intellectual property.
Economic power could gradually migrate from nations fortunate enough to possess hydrocarbons beneath their soil toward nations capable of manufacturing sophisticated energy systems above it.
The Chinese direction is unmistakable. EAST’s long-duration confinement, the 2026 density breakthrough, the enormous superconducting magnet, BEST’s scheduled 2027 completion and China’s decision to elevate fusion within its national industrial strategy collectively demonstrate a progression from understanding fusion toward engineering fusion. That progression should command the attention of every hydrocarbon-dependent economy.
The oil age will not end tomorrow, nor will fusion automatically replace every existing energy source. But technological revolutions rarely announce precisely when an established economic order has reached its peak. They advance experiment by experiment until the economics suddenly begin changing.
China has not yet sounded the death knell for the oil age. But its laboratories are demonstrating that an alternative energy order is becoming scientifically imaginable and increasingly technologically tangible. The bell has not yet tolled for oil—but China may already be forging it.