1/10/25
No World Order is permanent. Concentrations of power shift like tectonic plates over time, and global political arrangements shift accordingly. The arrangement we’re currently under has been showing signs of strain lately—the plates it rests upon have been shifting, sometimes imperceptibly, sometimes in quick jolts, but the result is always the same. Something new is being born; the old order withers.
We enjoy the strange privilege of living in an in-between time when everything is being rearranged but the final result is not yet in view. No one knows what’s on the other side of this transition. But there are clues and hints.
Russia is in the process of annexing a neighboring country by force. I expect that in the not-too-distant future China will attempt the same, or perhaps use vaguer means which nonetheless impose Chinese will. America has a choice—to indulge these land grabs or to help resist them. I believe that all indications point towards the United States beginning to move towards indulging, looking the other way, or simply protesting through PR statements and toothless sanctions without doing anything meaningful to stop such behavior. We’re not there yet, but it’s where we’re heading.
But here’s the part which I don’t think is fully appreciated—the US will not simply retreat into splendid isolation. After all, we have a defense bureaucracy which won’t accept being put on ice, and an increasingly restless public which needs to be fed red meat from time to time. So a deal will have to be made.
That deal, I suspect, will be this: America will look the other way when China and Russia conduct their land grabs, so long as they look the other way when we conduct ours. We go back to the days of naked colonialism when the great powers divide up the world.
But here’s what will be different about our new imperialist age: the great powers have nukes now. So whereas in the past great empires went to war, sometimes out of jealousy of each other’s imperial possessions, now war between the great powers would be unthinkable.
I fear that this might mean a New World Order based not, as many conspiracy theorists have long believed, on a single global government. Rather, the next system might be one in which the world is governed by three states who agree to accommodate each other’s empires in the interest of maintaining stability.
So rather than a new Cold War between America and China, we’ll get a new age of imperialism, but one where the imperial powers collaborate more than they compete. The question will be, can human freedom endure under such an arrangement, or will the forces of national expansion suffocate what remains of individual liberty?
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