The old world history is dying and the new world history struggles to be born

My 2025 world history tour of world powers

Antonio Gramsci shared our sense that the world is in crisis. He wrote of the ‘morbid symptoms’ that emerged in the interregnum between the old and new world orders.

“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”

Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks

The phrase is evoked regularly to this day. But Gramsci wrote his Prison Notebooks between 1929 and 1935.

The world was not dying, although it was marching determinedly into a global war. Only a way of seeing the world was dying. The old world history was dying and new world histories struggled to be born.

The time of monsters was a creation of a failure of imagination. The idea of the world held by Gramsci and his opponents had not adapted to the sensed realities of the world. Historical imagination failed. Without better stories of the world, many monsters rampaged through uncertain times.

We suffer the same problem today.

Monsters in our histories of the world

There is a gap between our histories of the world and our sense of the changing reality of the world. My recent articles on the breakdown of the post-1945 world order have highlighted the gap in geopolitics. The illusory history of the US-led world order no longer maps the changing realities of the multipolar world. The gap is most consequential in the difference between the assumed supremacy of USA leaders and the widely distributed power of the whole world. The unipolar illusion has collapsed and with it our familiar tales of world history as the West’s Pilgrim’s Progress towards American Greatness have become incoherent.

The time of monsters has arrived, and our historical imagination struggles to adapt. The farcical world historical personage of this time is Donald Trump. He is a symptom of this time of monsters. He is not its cause, nor its champion, and he has next to no control over the events he seeks to stage manage. His statements are impulsive outbursts of the American leadership mind, beset by morbid symptoms after the breakdown of the old world history, in which the USA dominates the world.

Flailing in the time of monsters, Trump and his USA opponents bluster on. But the rest of the world is moving on. There the new history of the world is struggling to be born. A minor exchange between the USA President-elect and the Mexican President over Donald Trump’s recent statements on a Greater America symbolised this struggle between two visions of world history.

Trump declared his ambition to seize Canada, Greenland and the Panama Canal, and to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America. Some geopolitical commentators bizarrely described this shakedown as ‘retrenchment’ of American globalism and a return to ‘realist great power politics’. Trump’s America First cheerleaders were infected with heroic nationalism, akin to Europe in August 1914. Charlie Kirk, a right-wing media personality, gave voice to the undead world histories of the time of monsters. Kirk said:

"It's reawakening the American dream, that we're no longer sad, low-testosterone, beta males hunched over in chairs, letting the world run over us. It's the resurrection of the male American energy. It's the return of Manifest Destiny."

But the USA’s credibility and diplomatic hegemony, even in the Americas, is shot in this interregnum between world orders. The Mexican President, Claudia Scheinbaum, mocked this new Manifest Destiny. Standing at her regular press conference next to a world map, Scheinbaum suggested that rather than rename the Gulf of Mexico, the international community ought to rename North America to be "Mexican America." This territory had this name in 1814 in the document that was the forerunner of Mexico's Constitution and preceded the Westward conquering of Mexican American lands by the Thirteen Colonies. "Sounds really nice, doesn't it?" she added. She added that the Gulf of Mexico has been called that since 1607.

The new world history is beyond the struggle to be born. It is standing on its own two feet, and talking back to the flailing, incoherent monsters of the ‘US-led world order’. Throughout 2025 I will be sharing with you those other ways of telling stories of the world. If we listen to these new stories we might find our way through this night of monsters, and adapt to the big historical changes that have broken the old ways of making sense of the reality of the world.

Three world history changes struggle to be born

The new world history helps us to adapt to three major changes in the world.

First, American Primacy has fallen. It is no longer the sole superpower, the leader of the free world, or the architect of world order. Its dominion has waned across all domains that underpin global influence: business, war, diplomacy, culture and political ideas.

Second, the fall of American primacy makes its Partition of Eurasia unsustainable. After 1945 the USA redrew the world map, as described by John Darwin in After Tamerlane, in an era of American expansion. The USA entrenched itself at both ends of Eurasia, divided societies (Germany, Eastern Europe, Korea, and China in Taiwan), and asserted extra-territorial rights through 800 military bases in at least 55 countries. But the diminished America can no longer sustain this bloated, unprecedented global empire.

Third, the post-1945 way of seeing the world - the ‘US-led world order’ - has also broken down. The prosperous, polyphonic world of 2024 looks very different to the ‘bombed out city’ of 1945, commanded by an unscathed White Anglo-Saxon Protestant USA.

The time of monsters is also the end of the history of the American Century. After the fall of American Primacy, the major civilization-states of Eurasia are reasserting themselves. China, India and Russia are now among the five great powers of the world. Even Europe, so long trapped in a bad marriage to the USA, might flee its abusive partner when its leaders realise they are sleeping with Donald Trump.

My 2025 world history tour of world powers

While this old world history dies, my world history tour of world powers this year will help you reimagine the world after this time of monsters. In my Saturday posts this year I will use history to loosen up fixed ideas about the history of five great ‘civilization states’: USA, China, Europe, India, and Russia.

Although each of these ‘civilization states’ can be seen as separate, they all cross borders. I feel connections, affiliations and curiosity about each of them. I belong to none of them, although one might say that Australia is an outer province of the USA’s global dominion. But I feel shaped by each of these five cultures, and I see none of them as fixed or entirely foreign to me.

My aim is to learn how to adapt to this changing world. I see myself as starting out on a fantastic journey of discovery through history, and am looking forward to sharing these travels with you.

My hope is this series encourages dialogue, empathy and the processes of peace. But I am ‘realistic’ enough to know we live in a time of war, as well as monsters. My writing on these topics is also a way to prepare mentally for what may be difficult years.

I have a special note for American readers. None of these writings are “anti-American.” They are opportunities for Americans to see the world through the eyes of the rest of the world, without the monsters of American exceptionalism. With the election of Donald Trump, and signs that he will reassert heavy-handed American power, the time seems right for Americans to reflect on how to adapt to the changing world that struggles to be born.

That is the spirit of my critique of American Primacy. It holds a wish to adapt to the new world, not to nurse the grievance of a dying world. I have heard from many readers and viewers from the USA who do exactly that, to seek to adapt as equals to a changing world.

It is the reason I will begin my world tour of world history through five great ‘civilization-states’ with America. The schedule for this series is:

• U.S.A - 25 January to 19 March

• China - 22 March to 14 May

• India - 17 May to 9 July

• Europe - 12 July to 3 September

• Modernism - 3 September and 18 October

• Russia - 18 October to 10 December.

Each bracket on ‘civilization-states’ will follow a pattern.

• Weeks 1 to 4 will examine a recently published high-quality history book that offers a new perspective on the civilization-states or great power

• Week 5 will look at a classic history essay, book or source and how the ideas of that source can be seen with fresh eyes today

• Week 6 will look at a major social or cultural issue

• Week 7 will look at a biography of a leader of that state or culture

• Week 8 will look at a leading modernist or Nobel Prize winning author from that state or culture.

I will focus my Saturday posts on a key book or source recommendation. In total I will offer you 50 book recommendations throughout the year, and wherever possible, I will give you a free link to a talk where you can get a brief version of the writer’s ideas in one hour or less. Of course, it is entirely up to you how many of these book recommendations you follow up.

My book recommendations to reimagine America

The schedule for the series on the USA and America from 25 January to 19 March is

• Week One: Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Our America: A Hispanic History of the United States

• Week Two: Kathleen DuVal, Native Nations: A Millennium in North America (Winner 2024 Cundill History Prize)

• Week Three: Adam Tooze, The Deluge: The Great War and the Remaking of Global Order 1916-1931

• Week Four: Aaron Good, American Exception: Empire and the Deep State (this may change to another option)

• Week Five: Classic Essay Recommendation: Frederick Jackson Turner, The Significance of the Frontier in American History (1893)

• Week Six - Social/Cultural Issue: Health, with real data from a recent Commonwealth Fund report on the USA health system

• Week Seven - Biography: Barack Obama, The Promised Land

• Week Eight - Writer: F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)

Each week I will build on the themes of the Saturday post in a deep dive on the following Wednesday post for paid subscribers. And next Wednesday, I will follow that model too with a deeper dive into the three primary changes (fall of American Primacy, erosion of the Partition of Eurasia, and the breakdown of the ways of seeing the ‘post-1945’ world of the West).

This whole fantastic journey across many borders will be complemented by our slow read of Olga Tokarczuk, The Books of Jacob. On Monday I will be bringing you the next of my posts inviting you to join me on that slow read. We will meet the marvellous main characters of this astonishing historical novel.

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