Dr. Arvind Kumar*
As we reflect on 2025 from the vantage point of January 2026, a defining paradox becomes impossible to ignore. The year opened with an unprecedented density of global convening’s; leaders spoke at length about water security, sustainable industrialization, social protection, gender equality, and climate action. Declarations were issued, roadmaps unveiled, and commitments reaffirmed across nearly every Sustainable Development Goal. The machinery of multilateralism appeared fully operational. And yet, beneath this choreography of cooperation lay a harsher reality. When economic pressure and geopolitical rivalry intervened, collective frameworks collapsed with remarkable speed. Nations retreated into unilateral nationalism, privileging short-term domestic interests over shared survival.
This cognitive dissonance was not abstract it was quantifiable. In September 2025, UN Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed declared that “even at a moment of division and uncertainty, the resolve to fight the climate crisis is alive and strong.” Yet the numbers told another story. Global military spending reached USD 2.7 trillion in 2025, a 9.4% increase, the steepest since the Cold War. In his year-end address, UN Secretary-General António Guterres was unusually blunt: “Global military spending has soared to 2.7 trillion dollars—thirteen times more than all development aid, equivalent to the entire GDP of Africa.” The contrast was stark. While governments professed concern for climate stability and human development, they allocated thirteen times more resources to warfare than to development.
The injustice deepened when set against humanitarian realities. In 2025, over 200 million people required humanitarian assistance, and nearly 120 million were forcibly displaced by conflict and persecution. Guterres’s report The Security We Need revealed an uncomfortable truth: just 4% of global military spending could end world hunger by 2030, while 15% could fund climate adaptation across the developing world. Instead, the world chose weapons over food, deterrence over resilience—a policy choice so consequential it bordered on structural violence.
Great Divergence
Nowhere was this failure more visible than in climate finance. The Loss and Damage Fund, celebrated at COP27 as long-overdue recognition of historical responsibility, remained functionally insolvent throughout 2025. Total pledges reached just USD 768 million, against estimated climate-related losses exceeding USD 2 trillion annually when cascading and ecosystem impacts are considered. COP30’s headline outcome – an agreement to triple adaptation finance by 2035 offered little comfort to nations facing floods, droughts, and heatwaves today. The oft-cited USD 1.3 trillion annual climate investment need remained aspirational, not binding.
The irony of 2025 was perhaps sharpest in the energy sector. Western capitals that styled themselves as climate leaders expanded fossil fuel production under the banner of “energy security.” The United States reached a record 13.6 million barrels of crude oil per day in July 2025, driven by an explicit policy of energy dominance. When economic pressure mounted, green rhetoric evaporated. Conversely, it was the Gulf monarchies long caricatured as extractive laggards that invested most aggressively in the energy transition. Saudi Arabia awarded over USD 8 billion in renewable contracts, launching 4.5 GW of projects in 2025 alone, while the UAE and Saudi Arabia together mobilized more than USD 32 billion in clean energy investments. Saudi Arabia is now positioned to reach 50% renewable electricity by 2030. The petrostate was building solar empires while the self-proclaimed green champions drilled harder an inversion not lost on the Global South.
Multilateral institutions themselves showed visible strain. Created after World War II to advance peace and development, the United Nations entered what many observers described as institutional trauma. Funding freezes and arrears reaching USD 2.4 billion, with the United States owing USD 1.5 billion forced staffing cuts. The Security Council remained paralyzed by veto politics. Only 43 heads of government attended the 2025 General Assembly, underscoring declining political relevance. The withdrawal of the United States from the Paris Agreement and the World Health Organization symbolized a broader retreat from consensus-based governance.
The Paris Agreement marked its tenth anniversary not as a triumph, but as a site of contestation. Developing nations increasingly rejected mitigation-first narratives that ignored unfinished development imperatives. With legally binding targets replaced by voluntary pledges, accountability eroded. Developed countries continued fossil expansion while demanding rapid decarbonization from poorer nations an asymmetry widely perceived as hypocrisy.
Yet 2025 also marked a strategic inflection. At COP30, developing countries—led by India, China, Brazil, and Saudi Arabia—collectively blocked fossil fuel phase-out language pushed by wealthy nations. Initiatives such as the Tropical Forests Forever Facility and the Belém Mission emerged with substantial Global South influence. For the first time, the South stopped seeking Western validation and began shaping the agenda. This shift coincided with tangible development progress. Bangladesh, Laos, and Nepal are set to graduate from Least Developed Country status in 2026, with several African nations close behind. But graduation brings vulnerability: loss of trade preferences and concessional finance. As these countries asked where future support would come from, the answer from the Global North—protectionism, tariffs, and retreat—was deeply unsettling.
The question at the heart of 2025 is unavoidable: was global development ever truly universal, or merely conditional? The rhetoric of unity coexisted with actions that entrenched inequality and fragmentation. Nations pursued individual advantage while the Global South increasingly carried the burden of collective responsibility.
Way forward
The path forward demands a recalibration grounded in realism rather than performative diplomacy. Developing nations must consolidate their agency through sustained South-South coordination, shifting from begging bowls to internal value creation. Climate action must be re-anchored in historical justice acknowledging that wealthy nations’ industrialization was fossil-fueled and that development rights remain unfinished business for the poor. Energy transitions must be pragmatic and nationally determined, balancing decarbonization with energy security, affordability, and sovereignty rather than accepting externally imposed templates. Financial architectures must be reformed to move from charity to obligation, from loans to grants, from conditionality to trust. The institutions that failed to prevent conflict, hunger, and climate catastrophe cannot be salvaged through incremental reform.
The defining lesson of 2025 is clear: credibility, not ceremony, will shape the future. As the developed world retreats into nationalism, militarization, and green protectionism, moral leadership has fractured. Whether the Global South can translate solidarityas per the philosophy of Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam; the world is one family or into durable institutions and shared prosperity will determine whether the great divergence of 2025 marks a breakdown or the birth of a new global order.
*Editor, Focus Global Reporter
