2026: The Year of the Himalaya

According to the Chinese zodiac, 2026 is the Year of the Horse — a sign associated with energy, forward motion, and momentum. Yet if the first eight days of the year are any indication, that horse did not enter the arena trotting with elegance; it galloped in wild and unbridled, riderless and without brakes. More than a year of the horse, the world seems on pace for the Year of the Himalaya. Because in the Himalaya, you don’t walk — you climb. And when everything climbs at once, the danger isn’t reaching the summit; it’s falling on the descent.

A mere eight days into 2026 and the global landscape already looks disquieting. There are no plains, no rest stops, no plateaus to catch one’s breath. The path is uphill. And if the calendar does not deceive us — this is not a leap year — we have 357 days left to see whether we emerge into December sound and whole, or whether this early ascent is merely the prologue to a year designed to test the resilience of the international system — or even humanity’s survival itself.

Nothing Closes; Everything Mounts

The base camp of this global mountain is in Africa, where mass killings in Nigeria, the Sahel, Burkina Faso, Mali, and Mozambique have become a kind of landscape: the horror is so repetitive that it no longer shocks. Innocent victims lie at the foot of the geopolitical Himalaya before the climb even begins, and the world turns its back.

The slope steepens once we enter the Middle East. Iran burns again; its regime tortures and imprisons, but the conflict never resolves. Meanwhile, Yemen has ceased to be a forgotten war and has become a war within a war: the fracture between Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates has ruptured other balances. Israel and Gaza remain trapped in a conflict with no clear end, administered rather than solved. Nothing closes; everything overlaps — like layers of snow on a slope that can no longer withstand additional weight. The danger of an avalanche is imminent.

Ambiguous Powers and Unanswered Wars

The United States appears as an ambiguous, unpredictable actor. It can intervene — as in Venezuela, where the arrest of Nicolás Maduro was almost cinematic — but in other theatres it lacks clear decisiveness. The spectacular capture of Maduro has not, at least so far, improved the material conditions of Venezuelans.

Meanwhile, Europe climbs with its oxygen running out. In the West, Portugal prepares for elections that could change its political map in weeks. Spain offers a scene that seems almost quaint: talk of government weariness, motions of no confidence, early elections, and an opposition doing everything possible to ensure that nothing changes. In the People’s Party’s headquarters in Génova, deputies debate international law over Maduro’s extraction as if such jurisprudential disquisitions will win voters instead of losing them.

This Iberian paradox is acquiring worrying contours. The country moves counter to Europe, out of sync with the continent’s political pulse. Yet perhaps the real paradox wouldn’t be that the PSOE disappears, as happened in Greece, Italy, or France with their socialist parties reduced to museum pieces, but that instead the People’s Party disappears — trapped inside its own timidity.

Crossing the Pyrenees, the slope climbs even steeper. France has no guarantees: no assured social cohesion, no stable leadership, no capacity for containment. Every step eastward in Europe is more treacherous than the last. Ukraine is the vertical wall of the contemporary Himalaya — a war without resolution, without clear victory, without visible exit. Russia doesn’t fall. Ukraine doesn’t surrender. And suddenly — the U.S. no longer leads as it once did. The security ropes tighten, and any slip could drag the entire team down. All of this unfolds in just eight days. Eight days. And 357 remain ahead.

The Mountain Knows When to Stop

In mountaineering, seasoned climbers know that victory goes not to the one who ascends fastest but to the one who knows when to stop. They also know that the greatest enemy is not the mountain itself, but hubris.

Albert Camus wrote in The Myth of Sisyphus: “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.”He did not advocate literal suicide; he posed it as a limit question: does life have meaning? Let’s hope the real political problem of the world is not the same. Let’s hope this global ascent is not a collective suicide draped in rhetoric, flags, and brutal or solemn extremisms.

If there is one thing clear at the start of this year, it is this: nobody’s slowing the pace. If 2026 insists on being the Year of the Himalaya, it would be wise to recall a phrase from the comic strip Mafalda that now sounds less ingenuous and more urgent than ever: “Stop the world — I want to get off.” Many of us have already reached that point. Many more are afraid even to look down, lest they feel the vertigo or the insane pull of the precipice.