How the tides of globalisation turned against the West

Empire, geopolitics, and world history in crisis part one

Crises do not change the world. Crises reveal a changed and sometimes diseased world.  

The world entered a crisis when the war in Ukraine began in 2022 and has entered a new phase with the conflict in Gaza in 2023. In late 2024, the conflicts are at risk of intensifying and spreading.

As the crisis spirals outside any executive control, many pundits declare that World War Three is coming. Like W.B. Yeats in “The Second Coming”, many feel that surely some revelation is at hand.

But what is this new world metamorphosing from the empty shell of the post-1945 world? How does it fit into the shared story that most of the Western world embraced after 1991 of irreversible, benign globalization in a world of democratic nations?

There are many ‘geopolitical’ pundits bestowing names on this changed and disordered world. Richard Haas some years ago described the New World Disorder that had emerged, in his view, from the slackened reins of American leadership. Joe Biden weighed in, with characteristic precision, to offer the new term, of a “new, new world order”.

Many agree that the unipolar moment is over, yet until the recent events in Israel and Gaza many powerful decision makers were reluctant to accept the term ‘multipolar’ world. Since those events, some pundits of multipolarity, such as Phillip Pilkington of the Multipolarity podcast, report that Washington and London insiders now admit they were right. The US empire no longer rules the world alone, even if President Biden repeats the old story that it is the most powerful nation ever in human history.

The attempt to fix the character of our new world struggling to be born into a single “world order” reveals a mental habit that does not serve us well. History does not proceed in a neat sequence of slides from one ‘world order’ to another, interrupted only by brief crises that do not displace the masters of the universe or “globalist elites”.

World history does not fit snugly into a boxset of eras. This thinking habit comes from the old mental architecture of ancient, medieval, and modern history. This Christian biblical thinking has shaped mythic histories of the West. But the world’s real geography and true history is made of wilder processes and more chthonic chaos than is dreamt of in nineteenth century historical schemas and the fancies of geopolitical analysts.

We should resist the temptation to declare that a single event is the gateway into a whole new era, and a world of fundamentally different distributions of power, resources, and ideas. We should be attentive to the tired politician’s habit of collective amnesia, whether it is to say that this war, like no other, is unprovoked, or that these events are unprecedented, or that the world changed forever—and we can never go back—on October 7, September 11, 1989, 1945 or whatever date the apocalypse was declared on.

We should remind ourselves that despite appearances, historical processes do not change their pace because of 24/7 news coverage of the latest crisis. Time moves no faster in crises. The tides do not stop for Canute. Leaders have no magical capabilities that enable them to command the events of a crisis in ways they cannot otherwise do. The ships carrying oil from the Gulf go no faster to their destinations. The political leaders of the world make decisions with the same cognitive habits, shaped by the same old courtiers, emotions, grudges, repeated games, misread briefings, and mythologized histories. The missiles hit their targets with the same speed.

In the cauldron of the televised crisis, it may seem that there are decades in which nothing happens and weeks in which decades happen. But this is an illusion of the self-dramatising mind. What really happens in those weeks that shake the world are that the stories we have told ourselves about the world are suddenly revealed to be wrong. The central characters of our stories shuffle out of shot, and new actors, who stood for a longtime in a poorly lit corner of the scene, have the spotlight turned on them.

To avoid this illusion, we need to think mindfully with history. If we do, we can see more clearly how the world today is changing. It is leaving the empty shell of the post-1945 and post-1991 worlds, and something uncertain is coming into being. But to do so we need to use history as an antidote to the misleading stories about the past and the multipolar world that appear in most commentary on geopolitics.

All the standard geopolitical and economic theories do not describe this world that is coming into being. They are all based on fossilized stories about those post-1945 and post-1991 worlds. They confused the real history, geography, and social patterns of the world with a grand strategic chessboard. They confused the West’s experience of globalization since 1991 with universal history at its end. They confused the unsteady institutions of the last 30 years with a new world order, or even the liberal rules-based international order. They confused the modern consumer American West with the lineage of Western civilization, under threat from yet another reincarnation of the barbarian hordes screaming at civilization from beyond the gates of Europe.

Rather than these misleading mental maps of geopolitics, we should turn to that old-fashioned discipline of world history. But the world history we turn to must be different from the bowdlerised version that has taken hold through the post-1991 American academy. This view of world history conflates America with the world. It imagines the American Mind to be the sole inheritor of all the gifts of Greece, Rome, Western European modernity, and the British Empire. But without the imperialism. It spreads in the childlike stories of the rest of the world that fill Hollywood, Netflix, popular YouTube channels (such as @whatifalthist) and the vacuous analysis of the American intelligence community.

Even Zbigniew Brzezinski, the evil genius of American foreign policy adventurism, acknowledged that:

Americans don't learn about the world; they don't study world history, other than American history in a very one-sided fashion, and they don't study geography.

In Part Two of “How the tides of globalisation turned against the West”, I will show you how we can learn from history to live well now in this changing world.

Parts Two and Three of these posts will be available for paid subscribers over the next two weeks.

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