Each era has its fiction of stability. Before the pandemic, in-person attendance was the norm at work. The rigidity was not technological, but strategic, as being the first to change involved risks. An external shock caused virtual options that had been available for years to become part of our routine in a matter of months. The technologies already existed; what was new was the rising cost of not adopting them.
Today, in the face of the war in the Middle East, another fiction begins to crumble: that of a global economy sustained indefinitely on cheap energy, secure routes, and supply chains optimized almost exclusively for cost.
From efficiency to resilience
For decades, the organizing principle of trade has been efficiency, the “Shein model”: produce cheaply, transport as quickly as possible, and minimize stocks. This model had an implicit assumption: a relatively stable geopolitical context to guarantee open trade routes and accessible energy. This foundation allowed for intensive consumption, highly concentrated supply chains, and single providers, with maximum specialization—all with great environmental costs. During the pandemic, the collapse of maritime logistics, with freight values multiplied by ten and saturated ports, revealed the real cost of over-optimized chains. That’s where the search for redundancy began in earnest: safety stocks, nearshoring, multiple suppliers.
An order upheld by norms, with the United States as guarantor, is losing relevance. We are heading toward a bipolarity different from the classical one, a “complex bipolarity”: a fragmentation into blocs with active middle powers, or a bipolarity with interdependence. In this transition, the system's inertia and the cost of conversion have delayed adaptation in both industries and public policies. What the conflict in the Middle East brutally (and politically realistically) exposes is that the cost of not changing is rising.
The organizing principle of global trade is shifting from cost-optimized globalization to resilience-optimized globalization. Trade is becoming more redundant, more regionalized, and more expensive, prioritizing availability over price. Here is where Latin America, with mineral and energy resources and a geographic position that connects markets, appears on the map of those seeking to diversify.
Geopolitics enters Excel
The rising cost of energy can act as an economic disciplinarian, pushing companies and states to review inefficiencies, accelerate the adoption of renewables and selective electrification, diversify suppliers, and maintain strategic stocks to prevent shortages. The just-in-time model yields to the just-in-case. Efficiency, which was a virtue in a unipolar world, becomes fragility in one organized under bipolarity.
The conflict also accelerates the internalization of geopolitical risk as a business variable. Geopolitics overflows ministries and think tank indices and incorporates itself into companies' Excels, taking into account exposure to bottlenecks, sanctions, war premiums in insurance, and logistical fragility.
At the same time, energy assurance is being revalued as a matter of national security, or even regional security (for example, in Europe), not just as a variable of price or climate cycle. And, as happened during the pandemic, the shock also catalyzes a change in demand in more private acts, such as attention to fuel prices, awareness of consumption levels, and increased remote work.
A generation that already consumes differently
This process of resource reorganization occurs concurrently with a generational change that redefines the economic landscape from the ground up. New generations are consolidating habits that are more compatible with a fragmented, hybrid, and volatile world. Gen Z and millennials prioritize balance, learning, well-being, and purpose, not just salary, and when spending, they seek experience and identity.
Alongside the readjustment of geopolitical incentives, this selectivity in consumption behavior that comes with the generational shift can become structural and be a decisive factor, like the price of oil, with profound implications for businesses and public policies.
Latin America: opportunity or bystander?
In this realignment, Latin America occupies a position it rarely had: that of a region with strategic assets at a time when the world needs them. Argentina has Vaca Muerta and, together with Chile and Bolivia, completes the lithium triangle, a key mineral for the energy transition. Guyana rises as a significant oil exporter at a pace that even surprises optimists. Brazil combines agroindustry, offshore hydrocarbons, and a manufacturing industry with regional scale. The entire region offers ports with simultaneous access to the Atlantic and Pacific, proximity to North American and European markets, and a location that makes it a natural candidate for nearshoring in a world seeking more reliable and less politically exposed supply chains.
Add to this a political cycle that, with significant variations by country, has been producing more pragmatic and open-oriented governments: from Milei’s Argentina to Boric’s more moderate second half in Chile, including Uruguay, Ecuador, Panama, or the Dominican Republic. It is not ideological convergence: it is the logic of the moment. A world migrating toward predictable partners needs interlocutors with clear rules, not with sovereignist rhetoric.
Even Venezuela, long a source of regional instability, is undergoing a cautious normalization that, if consolidated, clears one of the continent's main tension points.
The region would benefit from a pragmatic alignment of ministries between East and West without crossing red lines, from political and macroeconomic predictability, especially through regulatory frameworks that attract capital and companies with international experience. The window of opportunity exists; we'll see if there is enough willingness and speed to open it before others do first.
A less naive world
None of this implies denying the obvious: wars destroy wealth, generate suffering, and amplify inequalities. The effects are asymmetric and hit harder those with less margin for adaptation.
The war in the Middle East is part of the creaking of a different world. A more expensive one, probably, but also more aware that efficiency without resilience was, at its core, another form of fragility. Just as the pandemic did not invent digitalization but accelerated it, the war is not creating a new economic model from scratch: it is forcing the transition to one that was already in gestation. Fictions are breaking. What comes next for Latin America will depend on what we are building today based on our reading of the world to come.
JULIANA MONTANI
Degree in Political Science from the University of Buenos Aires (UBA), specialization in International Relations, diploma from the INCAP School of Government. Analyst at the Institute of International Security and Strategic Affairs (ISIAE/CARI).
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