The American-led order, in its final incarnation, was a neoliberal construction. Proclaimed immortal in a forgotten “Washington consensus”, it has been killed off by regime change in the American capital. The system that was supposed to spread across the globe has disappeared in its country of origin. Trump has not only shattered free trade. By taking equity stakes in strategic industries, he has made American capitalism into a dirigiste enterprise ruled by himself and his friends. By authorising a criminal investigation into the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, he is undermining a central pillar of the neoliberal order and the primacy of the American dollar. As a functioning system neoliberalism remains semi-intact only in the European Union, a crumbling continental free market wedged helplessly between predatory mercantilist powers. If it retaliates against Trump’s tariff threats, the last bastion will fall.
Rather than being stuck in an uneasy hiatus, we are reverting to historical normalcy, with different regimes – empires and nation states, tyrannies and republics – competing in shifting alliances. Despite joining the World Trade Organisation in 2001, China has never accepted free-market globalisation and plans to instal its own state-led model. But it can no more corral all of humankind into a single economic system than America could. India will not submit to Chinese domination, nor will Japan surrender to become a Chinese tributary state. Vietnam and the Philippines will resist incorporation into Sinocentric structures. The globe’s axis is tilting from West to East; but there will be no new unipolar moment under Chinese auspices.
The international system built after the Second World War, along with that supposedly installed after the Cold War, is being demolished. In the December 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS), the US renounced any role as guarantor of international security, while claiming suzerainty over the Western Hemisphere – the “Trump corollary” of the Monroe Doctrine, renamed the “Donroe doctrine”. The document gives an official American stamp to multipolarity – the theory, for some time substantially fact, in which no power possesses the authority to impose its political economy throughout the world.
Trump’s Venezuela gambit followed the NSS playbook. The coup the US Army’s Delta Force and the CIA executed in Caracas was not an exercise in regime change. Aside from replacing Nicolás Maduro by his long-standing vice-president, Delcy Rodríguez, the repressive apparatus of government lies untouched.
The gambit is a reversion to the Great Game, with a crucial caveat. For all the babble about the rise of an economy based on the infinite expansion of knowledge, a struggle for control of finite natural resources is driving rivalry between great powers as it did between European empires. AI is reinventing the limits to growth. If China is pulling ahead in the technological arms race, one reason is that it has plenty of coal to feed energy-hungry data centres. Fossil fuels and scarce water resources are powering the digital revolution.