The End of the Long 20th Century
Historian Eric Hobsbawm borrowed from the Soviet writer Ilya Ehrenburg the concept of the long 19th century, a 125-year period from the French Revolution in 1789 to the First World War in 1914. The period is marked by the Enlightenment, the rise of national movements, and the rise of European empires amid the Industrial Revolution. I would suggest that 2025 or perhaps 2022 was the end of a long 20th century, marked by ideological conflicts between states, bipolarity, and eventual American hegemony, and now the end of the postwar order. Perhaps future historians will place this end during the financial crisis of 2008, or at the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, a member of the UN Security Council, and the strong economic response of the West, which shook global financial and energy flows. Or perhaps Trump’s first or second term, with his iconoclasm towards the traditional priorities and instruments of institutional American power in the world, will be declared the beginning of a new era. What is certain is that we are witnessing the gradual return of an anarchic global system, increasingly focused on unilateral actions by powerful states and in which the completion of secular trends in the fiscal, technological and investment fields is rewriting the map of power on the world map.
Casus belli
The invasion of Georgia in 2008 and the first invasion of Ukraine in 2014 were a warning about the Kremlin’s revisionist intentions. Changing borders by force was the exception, not the rule, of the post-war world. The failure of the Budapest Memorandum and Russia’s calculation of the political-diplomatic feasibility of intervention in Ukraine suggest an awareness of a loss of will in the West to uphold the rules-based international system (good or bad) against the backdrop of the gluttonous and optimistic years of the peace dividend and the end of history after the end of the Cold War. On the one hand, Russia as a guarantor of the UN system has dealt a terrible blow to the system. On the other hand, the unprecedented sanctions imposed on Russia after 2022, cumulatively over time, have accelerated the transition from a world based on globalization and increasingly integrated markets and supply lines to one with fragmented geopolitical and security lines. Increasingly, cooperation will become the exception, not the rule, and visible transactionalism will dominate negotiations, the most successful ones being bilateral and minilateral, following the example set by both the Trump Administration and China.
For 2026, I would say that we will witness a first ceasefire in Ukraine and the prospect of a fragile and contested peace. It will not be achieved by defeating Russia, which benefits from an “unlimited partnership” with China and from relations with opportunistic global actors such as India, while Western electorates have grown weary of Ukraine, and the option of the escalation of military support is in the hesitant hands of the Americans (such as the delivery of Tomahawk missiles). The current Administration and the Republican Party have every reason to want the war to end, but their rhetoric has included from the very beginning the potential for territorial cession and a controlled reintegration of Russia into international systems and markets. This range of possibilities offers Russia numerous opportunities to test and negotiate the limits of the patience of the guarantors of peace, which will be seen on the front lines and on the Internet and in global markets, where a permanent hybrid war will be waged. At least for a while, until rearmament and the opportunity to credibly contest the conflict, we will witness the end of conventional fighting in Ukraine.
In parallel, however, we will witness new attempts at territorial grabs at a global level. The precedent has already been set, and the limits of Western power and coordination have become apparent, both at the systemic level (such as in the financial area) and at the level of hard military power (if we recall the spectacle of British aircraft carriers that could not leave the port and German soldiers who conducted military exercises with brooms painted black instead of weapons). The older dispute between India and China has always been played out on peripheral territories, and the parties are adept at avoiding escalation. Instead, we may see a conflict between Venezuela and Guyana over Essequibo in the coming period, triggered not only by the newly discovered resources in the region, but also by the Maduro Regime’s strategic use of Venezuelan irredentism to smooth over the country’s internal divisions (n.b., Maduro has since been deposed but his regime is still in place). Also, the prospect of a conflict between Ethiopia and Eritrea or Somalia over access to the sea, an existential problem for Ethiopia and one that Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed is willing to resolve by force, cannot be neglected. Although less likely, because time is on the side of the Chinese, we may also see an escalation of military tension over Taiwan, possibly triggered by sovereign declarations from Taipei or ambiguous positions from Washington.
The economic problem
The reason why the 20th century is ending is also related to the natural exhaustion of the economic models that shaped it. Post-war globalization was generated by the American role as a global importer, the unprecedented flow of technology, capital and jobs to the developing world as political barriers collapsed (such as the Iron Curtain), and the strategic and unilateral application of protectionism and proactive industrial policies by countries such as South Korea, Japan, China and, why not, Poland, Brazil and others. The problem is that the model was not sustainable because it was not stable. Permanent deficits and surpluses created economic imbalances, and Western deindustrialization produced social pathologies and an ideological and political rebellion with a delayed but certain explosion in the form of the Trump movement but also other populist phenomena such as Brexit. China and other countries with the moral ascendancy of the producer do not represent new and sustainable models, because they too will have to adapt to the decline of the Western systems that have provided them with more or less free access to capital, technology and markets. There cannot be many “factories of the world”, surpluses cannot exist without deficits, and the Beijing consensus exists only in counterbalance to the Washington consensus. In parallel, the redistribution of global economic power (both in relative and absolute terms) exposes the fact that the other beneficiaries of the Western order are not willing to lend their shoulder to its support even if they were net beneficiaries in the past. Without the ascendancy of the West, few elements of its post-war order will survive, more as historical echoes and customs. Countries like China have well-established geopolitical agendas to achieve regional hegemony and to neutralize Western constraints, and they see the status of beneficiary of the Pax Americana as a discrete period of national development, not a desirable permanent tutelage.
In parallel, the exhaustion of the Western economic model based on the march towards a service and knowledge-based economy is accompanied by the dual demographic and fiscal crisis. They have been covered up by an unprecedented period of low interest rates on government bonds that financed generous social systems and redistribution and investment projects in society based on ideologies that have proven fragile. The explosion of the US national debt and the French fiscal crisis, accompanied by much higher debt refinancing costs, anticipate similar problems at the level of many Western states and beyond. In the absence of a productivity miracle such as useful AI, many Western states will find themselves much poorer than they imagined they were, while others will end up in the middle-income trap and stagnate because they have aged and ossified before getting rich. Romania and all of Eastern Europe are in this category, as well as Latin America and Southeast Asia. Let us not forget that China, too, is witnessing the peak of its labour force and will face pressure to create welfare systems that compensate for its extreme social patterns. These forces are serious enough to risk interrupting China’s rise, although the state will remain a potent force and at least a permanent challenger to the US.
Donald Trump’s renegotiation of the “social contract” between the hegemon and other participants in the international system, especially formal US allies, has represented another shock in economic, security and political terms. The introduction of unilateral tariffs, the marginalization of the World Trade Organization and the replacement of slow negotiations with personal diplomacy and arbitrary gestures represent a paradigm shift. The disappearance of old certainties forces a reassessment of yesterday’s orthodoxies, such as the prioritization of free trade, or the “lotus-eating” lifestyle of Western states that have underinvested in defence, innovation and virtuous illusions.
The technological problem
Instead of concluding, I would like to point out that technology is the surprise factor that can completely change the equation. Perhaps technology will provide us with a way to adapt to demographic decline and the need for transfers to the large and politically influential generations of the elderly. The great problems of the environment, health, or access to critical resources such as water and energy can be solved by technology, and defence technology can provide the equalizer we need to deter aggression. Hence the moral hazard of the leadership in Silicon Valley and other technocratic centres that consider technological advance as inevitable and the solutions to our problems as just around the corner, whether we are talking about saving the environment, immortality, or prosperity for all. In this regard, attitudes of tech inevitability are a weakness of the West and a factor behind the neglect of the honest work of solving our problems step by step.
Photo source: PxHere.com.
