Realistic Pessimism: A Survey of a Fracturing World Order

A decisive turn in the meaning of international power

By Samir al-Taqi

In 1901, the Briton Norman Angell wrote that the dense economic interdependence between London and Berlin had forever ended the logic of war among the great powers. The Great War, thirteen years later, refuted him absolutely.

Angell’s error was not his failure to foresee the bullet at Sarajevo, but his blindness to the structural pressures accumulating beneath the surface of the entire international system. That is the methodological lesson worth recovering today, when our own world order once again appears reassuring on the surface and fractured in its depths.

The order that followed 1945 was not, in essence, an economic arrangement so much as a security bargain. At Bretton Woods, Washington bought a system of alliances—a strategic bribe against communism—which soon turned into production chains for industry, agriculture, and equipment, protected by American fleets along the arteries of global trade.

But the evidence now accumulates plainly: America is no longer able, politically or militarily, nor willing, to guarantee this system. From the pirates of Somalia to the Strait of Malacca to the current Gulf crisis, the signals of a quiet withdrawal from the role of guarantor of last resort keep coming.

Atop this security fracture sits a demographic reversal running counter to the whole modern historical trajectory. In the agrarian economy the child was, in essence, a productive asset; globalization turned the child into a burden on the urban family. The generation of buyers steadily shrinks, and the cohort of those in their fifties—once the engine of productive capacity and world trade—withers.

Some sardonic pessimists remind us of the Black Death, which wiped out a third of Europe’s population, and reckon it the best thing that ever befell Western civilization: labor scarcity freed the serfs, wages rose, and the reins were handed to the bourgeoisie and the city-state.

Does the present contraction conceal, behind its visible tragedy, the possibility of a similar transformation? The question is open, but the context is radically different. What was local and limited in the fourteenth century is today global and interlinked, so that any disruption rolls—like a domino—across technology, money, and energy at once. That is precisely what the Ukrainian war, and then the Iranian one, lay bare in the concrete.

As the world’s capacity to refine oil slips below the minimum operational threshold, a chain reaction is set off toward a comprehensive crisis, for no technological sector functions without active global trade and sufficient fuel.

America exports roughly five million barrels a day of refined products, and reaps relative gains in energy and agriculture even as its industrial base erodes. The pessimistic experts estimate that agricultural and industrial output will fall in numerous countries by enough to shrink their populations by as much as half.

Either the demographic or the productive crisis alone would suffice to deliver a global shock. But the two now converge to generate a rare compound: a contraction interwoven with a sharp inflationary drift, amid a general decline in consumption—even as states rush to maximize their output and stockpiles in flight from the fragility of supply chains. Under the threat of a Taiwan crisis, the advanced economies race to build ruinously expensive chip plants, exporting near-term inflation and later deflation.

In the 1930s, supply chains intersected across two or three states. Today the supply chain for a single chip stretches to some sixty countries and two hundred companies, producing one product for one customer through a chain of a hundred thousand steps. Yet a single Dutch company, ASML, monopolizes its most advanced stages. Removing a handful of firms is enough to halt the entire chain. The current drone wars, however, do not require those ultra-advanced chips; they make do with the deep-ultraviolet technology that many countries produce in abundance—China among them.

And while these drones cannot occupy ground, they are enough to knock out the infrastructure near any advanced state’s borders, leaving it exposed before weaker adversaries.

This is a decisive turn in the meaning of international power. After America reveled—to the point of intoxication—in thirty years of military-technological supremacy, that power is now available to states and militias alike, in the wake of the second military revolution.

Russia, for its part—having built its combat reputation on the endurance of pain and successful defense—has historically lost every offensive war (save the Great Patriotic War), and every Russian offensive was followed by deep internal upheaval: the Crimean War and then Alexander II’s reforms; the war of 1905, then the Duma, then the Bolshevik Revolution; the First Chechen War, then the fall of Yeltsin. Will the fallout of the Ukraine war turn into a nuclear convulsion? It is enough “for Russia to grow tense for its large neighbors to grow tense.”

The collapse of the system of collective deterrence pushes smaller states—from Finland to Poland to Turkey—to think openly about a nuclear deterrent of their own, while the European Union expands to fill the strategic vacuum between Russia and the Middle East, shifting steadily from a financial club into a political-military entity.

China remains the only parallel Eurasian power—less ideological, of far greater capacity—yet the most beholden to globalization itself, importing and exporting some eighty percent of its trade. It has neither the luxury of leading a globalization of its own, nor the luxury of a war that would remedy its excessive dependence on the existing order.

Faced with this reality, the American choice divides between a clean bipolarity with Beijing—favored by the security establishment for the ease of its mathematical solution—or an attempt to restore hegemony through supremacy in artificial intelligence and quantum computing.

The transformation is accompanied, moreover, by a deeper change in the structure of the nation-state. For fifteen centuries, civilization rested on producing more for more people, and on ever more consumption. For the first time in history, the equation is inverted: maintaining the standard of living through less production, for fewer people.

This inversion drains the nation-state of its historic ideological foundation, turning it, in many countries, into what Asimov called the “hollow state”: a shell protecting an entrenched oligarchy, while the young live in their isolation with artificial intelligence—without institutions, without a unifying political life, in a governmental vacuum where the state cannot respond to shocks, facing a public at once furious and indifferent.

And yet the principle of the state—as the fundamental mandate to organize the monopoly of collective violence—is too hard to abolish. From the East India Company to the Hudson’s Bay Company, the state has historically triumphed over all the power of commercial and technological monopolies, and a single company owning eighty percent of the satellites will be no exception.

The new form of the national state, after the death of its nationalist model, has not yet been written. It may be more merciful or more cruel, personalist or institutional, feudal or wholly invented. After the population of ancient Rome fell from a million to fifty thousand, those who remained had forgotten how to produce most goods. The order whose twilight we are living today is incomparably more complex—and that alone is reason enough for our realistic pessimism. Article link https://annah.ar/336511