Policymakers are almost always faced with a choice between rupture and continuity. Do you break up systems, and let things fall where they will, or do you choose continuity?
Donald Trump’s regime has caused a rupture that may reverberate for decades to come, and that would probably bring about that global shift and transformation that has been on the lips and in the nibs of writers and thinkers for the past two decades.
The Trump regime seems to have abandoned the continual practices and alliance-building within that nébuleuse of institutions, practices and conventions that have held the North Atlantic community together, in particular (since the creation of Nato in 1949), and the world in general, since the 16th century. We should not dismiss the latter easily; it was about 500 years ago that capitalism replaced feudalism and took a greater hold of world order.
What has “cracked”, as The Economist wrote at the weekend, was the permanent military strategic relationship that has been a cornerstone of the North Atlantic community since 1949. Recall that political-economic orders are kept in place by actual military force, or threats of it. This relationship might take “decades” to be repaired, The Economist opined. It’s difficult to see it being reconstituted in our lifetime, and it may well be replaced in the meantime anyway.
The Economist is usually not given to hyperbole. Nor is Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney whose address at Davos last week referred to a “rupture,” and “the end of a pleasant fiction and the beginning of a harsh reality, where geopolitics — where the large, main power geopolitics — is submitted to no limits, no constraints”.
The remilitarisation of European countries and Japan has previously been discussed in this space, and will continue. There will probably be no complete stop in the conflicts on the Eurasian Steppe and in Western Asia.
Also last week, the US “department of war” declassified its national defence strategy for 2026. In the opening passages secretary of war Pete Hegseth was dismissive of what he referred to as “self-congratulatory pledges to uphold cloud-castle abstractions like the rules-based international order”.
What is likely to follow is increased US militarism abroad without limits or constraints. Trump will throw “free-riders” overboard. We can expect a more vicious turn in the “war on drugs” which, to be clear, has been an obsession of the Europeans in East and Southeast Asia since the opium wars of the 19th century.
The remilitarisation of European countries and Japan has previously been discussed in this space, and will continue. There will probably be no complete stop in the conflicts on the Eurasian Steppe and in Western Asia.
Somewhere in the midst of it all is a break in that nébuleuse from whence transnational class alliances have exercised power, dominance and control of liberal global political economy (economic exchange, global finance and knowledge production). There is nothing conspiratorial about this. It simply refers to ideas about liberal capitalism that are shared by actors and agents globally.
Amartya Sen has written with some authority (to much acclaim) about individuals holding multiple identities and affiliations; you may have a national, ethnic or religious identity but agree on liberal capitalism across multiple identities.
In the meantime, a normative system that would replace the 500-year-old system is struggling to take shape. My old friend and former colleague Branko Milanovic, who I think is the best economist in the world today, believes it is likely there will not be a “new” or “another” system, and that capitalism may split into US-led meritocratic capitalism and political capitalism led by China.
Nonetheless, Carney and The Economist seem clear that there is a rupture. And if we take Hegseth at his word, the rules-based international order is a “cloud-castle abstraction”.
Suddenly, the choice between rupture and continuity is clear as mud. A greater task is convincing public and private corporate policymakers that, as the Persian poet Shams Tabrīzī suggested sometime in the 13th century, that a different world might just be a better world.
• Lagardien, an external examiner at the Nelson Mandela School of Public Governance, has worked in the office of the chief economist of the World Bank as well as the secretariat of the National Planning Commission.
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