The Grim Trigger World: Why the Resource Grab Has Already Begun

There is a mistake we keep making when we look at the world as it is now.

We assume that because there has been no formal announcement, no treaty torn up on live television, that nothing fundamental has changed. That we are still living inside the same system, just with louder arguments and worse manners.

I think we are wrong.

The post WW2 settlement hasn’t been attacked head-on; it has been quietly abandoned. And the replacement system is already operating around us, largely unnoticed, because it doesn’t look like conquest or change. It looks like contracts, ports, farmland, shipping lanes, insurance clauses, and supply chains.

We are entering what game theory would call a grim trigger world: a system where trust has collapsed, defection is assumed, and every major actor behaves as though cooperation is temporary and conditional.

Grim trigger describes a strategic world in which cooperation survives only while no one defects, but the moment trust is broken, or is assumed to be breakable, every actor permanently to self-protective, competitive behaviour. In such a system, states no longer optimise for efficiency or shared gain, but for control, resilience, and denial of vulnerability, because the cost of being dependent is judged to be existential.

Once you see it, it’s hard to unsee.

From rules to resources

For decades, globalisation rested on an assumption: that economic interdependence would restrain political conflict. Rules are more important. Countries might compete, but the cost of disruption would be too high for anyone to risk it.

That assumption no longer holds.

What has replaced it is brutally simple:

• Whoever controls essential resources controls outcomes.

• Whoever depends on others for essentials is vulnerable.

• Oil, gas, rare earth minerals, fertiliser, copper, lithium, water, farmland, shipping routes, ports, processing facilities — these are not abstract inputs. They are the physical foundations of modern life. And they are finite, concentrated, and increasingly politicised.

The United States is no longer subtle about this. It wants secure access to Venezuelan oil. It wants influence over the Panama Canal. It wants Greenland, for minerals, basing, and Arctic access. It wants to dominate emerging Arctic shipping routes.

China has been even more systematic, cornering rare earth processing, buying farmland, locking in water access, embedding itself in infrastructure through debt and construction, ensuring that even when it does not “own” assets, it controls their operation and maintenance.

These are not ideological projects. They are survival strategies in a system where trust has evaporated.

Why this feels selfish. And why that matters

It’s tempting to moralise this shift: to say countries are becoming more selfish, more cynical, more brutal.

But that misses the point.

They are responding rationally to scarcity.

In a world of abundance, cooperation pays.

In a world of scarcity, dependency kills.

When leaders believe that access to energy, food, or materials could be denied for political reasons, their incentive structure changes completely. Long-term norms give way to short-term control. Flexibility beats efficiency. Redundancy beats optimisation.

That’s the grim trigger logic: assume betrayal is coming, and act first.

The tragedy is that this logic becomes self-fulfilling. The more countries hoard, capture, and coerce, the less viable cooperation becomes, even when cooperation would still be better for everyone.

Europe’s dangerous confusion

I think nowhere is this shift more poorly understood than in the UK and Europe.

We are still arguing as if this were a culture war: net zero versus living standards, regulation versus growth, green ambition versus realism.

This is a profound misreading of the moment.

An economy dependent on imported fossil fuels in a resource-grab world is not pragmatic. It is strategically exposed. It is hostage to price spikes, shipping disruption, geopolitical leverage, and domestic unrest.

Sustainability is not a moral luxury. It is an attempt to exit the dependency trap.

Local energy generation, insulation, storage, demand reduction, circular materials, water efficiency, resilient grids are not lifestyle choices. They are and should be promoted as tools of autonomy.

When I read headlines claiming that investment in sustainability is making people colder or poorer, I don’t just disagree, I feel anger. Because that framing misses the real danger entirely. The danger is not that resources are being mismanaged in the name of net zero. The danger is that we are failing to grasp that finite resources are already being captured elsewhere.

You cannot outbid scarcity forever. You either reduce dependence or you accept vulnerability.

Why the media and public don’t see it

Part of the problem is visibility.

Resource capture doesn’t look like invasion. It looks like:

• long-term supply agreements

• port upgrades

• land purchases via holding companies

• export controls framed as “standards

• insurance decisions that quietly make routes unusable

These things are dull. They don’t fit the rhythms of outrage-driven media. They don’t lend themselves to heroes and villains.

Another part of the problem is language. We talk endlessly about GDP, inflation, and growth, but rarely about material limits. Energy return. Mineral intensity. Logistics resilience. System fragility.

So when pressure builds, people reach for simpler explanations: regulation, climate policy, bureaucracy, foreigners, elites.

Those stories are comforting. They are also wrong.

The grim truth

The US and China are not playing chess while everyone else plays checkers. They are improvising under pressure, making big bets, some of which will fail spectacularly.

But they have grasped something essential: the era of assumed access is over.

Europe, by contrast, still behaves as though markets will always clear and supply will always reappear, just at a new price. That belief is increasingly dangerous.

In a grim trigger world, price is not the problem. Availability is.

And availability is shaped by power, not preference.

Seeing the signal

This article is not an argument for despair or authoritarianism. It is a plea for clarity.

We need to stop asking whether sustainability is affordable and start asking whether dependency is survivable.

We need to stop treating resource security as a niche policy issue and recognise it as the central organising challenge of this generation.

And we need to understand that the fight is not between green idealism and economic realism. It is between those who see the limits of the system and those who still believe the old rules apply.

The resource grab has already begun. The only real choice left is whether we notice in time to respond intelligently, or whether we keep arguing about the wallpaper while the foundations quietly change hands.