A slew of new doomsaying books miss what’s coming round the bend.
Foreign Policy
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No one has done more than Donald Trump to assert the “primacy of nations” in today’s world, to quote his National Security Strategy. And the U.S. president has many nationalist fellow travelers in high places who also preach a fierce, almost religious, devotion to the nation-state—including Russian President Vladimir Putin, Chinese leader Xi Jinping, Hungary’s Viktor Orban, and insurgent right-wing parties around the globe.
The problem, however, is that the nation-state is badly broken and no longer working for average people around the world.
Riven by deepening inequalities in education, opportunity, and income, plundered by powerful oligarchs who extract wealth and then move on, corrupted institutionally and constitutionally, the nation-state is failing badly as a guarantor of individual rights, liberty, and prosperity, writes the British Indian author Rana Dasgupta in his new book, After Nations: The Making and Unmaking of a World Order.
And since Trump and his like-minded nationalists also hate globalism or any idea of international governance that leaves most people—the 99.75 percent of human beings on the planet who live in nation-states—with little to protect them and promote their pursuit of happiness.
The human race today is “politically naked,” concludes Dasgupta, a prominent essayist and novelist, in his compelling and brilliantly researched—if decidedly anti-Western—book.
The “nation-state system falls short of the most commonsensical conceptions of equality and justice,” he writes. “Since nation-states have monopolised our political life, that betrayal is existential: we have nothing else.” As a result, “the sensation of progress” developed over many centuries has been “replaced by the anxiety of futurelessness.”
This foreboding sense of “futurelessness” pervades a slew of new books that document the breakdown both of the international order and the national polities that are supposed to be caretakers of that order—but which are instead faltering or failing themselves.
For the economist Eswar Prasad, the world is caught in “the doom loop”—the title of his book—in which economic instability fosters political instability and populism, which in turn produces even more economic disorder, with no end in sight. In another new book, The Coming Storm: Power, Conflict, and Warnings from History, Yale University historian Odd Arne Westad fears we are slipping heedlessly into unstable world disorder that resembles nothing so much as the jostling imperial kingdoms of Europe shortly before they immolated themselves in World War I.
“China is simply unabsorbable in the current US-led system,” Milanovic concludes. That suggests a state of “incipient political unrest” not unlike the pre-World War I environment.
A person leans on a railing holding a small EU flag and overlooking empty seats in a Parliament chamber.
A person holds a European Union flag at the European Parliament building in Strasbourg, France, on June 9, 2024. Sebastien Bozon/AFP via Getty Images
It is true that the “sensation of progress” has all but disappeared in the West. In the United States and in Europe—the West, in other words—we are no longer even pretending that progress is the goal. On the contrary: As the United States approaches its 250th birthday on July 4, it almost resembles the late stages of the Roman republic—a once-proud land of crumbling institutions, dashed promises, and seemingly permanent disunion. Congress is divided between sycophancy and paralysis and, except for some hopeful court rulings in defiance of Trump’s autocratic exercise of power, the checks and balances of the system—the Constitution itself—seem to be failing.
And if empire is now the goal, with the U.S. president launching unprovoked wars from Venezuela to Iran, Americans aren’t very good imperialists either, it turns out. Trump, who for the past month has proved incapable of explaining why he just started a major new war in the Middle East that threatens the global economy, is certainly no Augustus Caesar.
Europe, meanwhile, can’t seem to fulfill what was once a common postwar hope for its own more perfect union—even in the face of what many Europeans see as an existential threat from Russia. Instead, the European Union has a permanent “incompleteness” problem, as Josef Janning wrote last year, adding that “European policymakers appear to have shelved the idea of a big step forward.” Despite a recent show of unity over Trump’s threats to Greenland, the EU remains seriously divided when it comes to considering a common capital market or defense industry, much less a unified defense policy. The EU’s consensus-driven machinery has led mainly to “paralysis,” Douglas Rediker and Heidi Crebo-Rediker wrote recently.
All in all, then, it’s time to end any illusions that we are progressing to some better final socio-political model, the delusional Western hope that rose out of the Enlightenment.
It is at this point that Dasgupta really sticks the knife in: We in the West were always kidding ourselves about all that progress anyway, he writes. Marshalling an impressive array of historical evidence, Dasgupta exposes the ugly downside of Western history and shows how our proudest advancements going back to the Enlightenment—the very concept of the nation-state and international law—have been fatally tainted from their beginnings.
Dating from the Spanish conquest of Latin America, Western scholars developed international law mainly to further “private interests, whose concerns have usually been acquisitive,” Dasgupta writes.
The writings of Hugo Grotius—the “acknowledged father” of international law—were largely intended to justify the predations of the Dutch East India Company and defy the imperialist designs of Spain and Portugal. Even the great John Locke, the father of liberalism who influenced the American Revolution, is portrayed as developing his theories of natural rights in part to defend the greed and acquisitiveness of his boss, the Earl of Shaftsbury, and other English colonizers. “Lockean ideas established for the English elite a global infinitude of property rights: land had only to be seized for propertied Englishmen, arguing for their superior powers of commercial exploitation, to claim legal title,” Dasgupta writes.
For Enlightenment thinkers like Locke, the Christian God was also invoked as the guardian of private property and the system of rights and laws, as well as the nation-state that upheld it. Thus the idea of Western liberalism that sprang out of these trends “was too imperial, too partial and too Christian to function as a universal faith,” Dasgupta writes.
For Dasgupta, Westad, and most of these other authors, the main obstacle to any future progress—and the chief solvent pulling the world apart—is the cult of the nation-state. “From Xi Jinping’s quest to regain China’s glory, to Vladimir Putin’s attempts at a new Russian empire, to the rise of populist anti-foreign attitudes in the United States, Britain, Germany, and France,” writes Westad, “such sentiments make major war more possible,” much as in the pre-1914 era.
What is perhaps most unnerving, Westad writes, is that the complacency among major governments that they can weather the storm today is eerily similar to back then. “We are shocked, even today, to see how quickly that notion unraveled in July 1914,” Westad writes. “There is no reason to believe that [control of crises] is more applicable in our own time. The speed of communications and news cycles, and the efficiency of twenty-first century weapons, not only reduce the time available to make decisions even further but also increase the distrust and fear of what others may be doing.”
Beyond that, given the vast array of today’s lethal technology—expanding nuclear arsenals, hypersonic missiles, biowarfare, AI-driven orbital bombardment systems, and the like—anything on the scale of another World War I would probably end up being World War Done. Game over, human race.
Four people stand looking at a plume
Workers look at a plume of black smoke following an explosion in the Fujairah industrial zone in the United Arab Emirates on March 3.Fadel Senna/AFP via Getty Images
Unfortunately, most of these new doomsaying books tend to make compelling cases for what’s gone wrong while supplying weak or nonexistent solutions for how to make things right. And the authors, for the most part, don’t do a very good job of seeing around the next bend.
Nor is it entirely true that the nation-state, in its various manifestations, has gone irredeemably bad. Some major nations, in particular those that didn’t fully buy into the zealous neoliberalism of the post-Cold War era—the myth of unfettered capitalism-as-panacea—are still delivering a better quality of life and relatively more social equity. Among them: Japan, the Nordic nations, Canada, and Australia.
What is worrisome is the condition of the really big nation-states, what you might call the world-historical ones. In particular, it’s no longer possible to lay any hopes on the future of the United States, which engendered and maintained the postwar global system but appears to be a rapidly failing nation-state caught in a doom spiral of its own making.
Ironically, the American people’s lack of faith in their political system is what led to the rise of Trump, the most powerful demagogue in U.S. history. But rather than answer those concerns and find a solution to the problem, Trump has exacerbated the crisis of faith in Washington by empowering more oligarchs and corporate interests, at the expense of any pretense of pursuing social equity.
Dasgupta notes that, in 2025, seven Silicon Valley companies had a combined market valuation of about $17 trillion, equivalent to nearly 60 percent of U.S. GDP—and that number is far greater than any corporate control of the economy in the past, even Standard Oil in the Gilded Age or during the 1960s, when U.S. industry was globally dominant. At the same time, these tech companies employ far fewer people—a number getting smaller all the time, thanks to artificial intelligence—and pay far less national tax, meaning the economic power that drives the U.S. economy has less interest than ever in making U.S. society a stable and equitable place.
The bottom line is that a smaller number of U.S. oligarchs—many of whom have made their way, obsequiously, to Trump’s White House, to do his bidding—control a much larger proportion of the U.S. economy even as they’re less responsible for the country’s overall prosperity and social stability.
And the great unwinding of the global system has only accelerated in the aftermath of Trump’s latest war (the U.S.-Israeli assault on Iran), which has inflamed the Middle East and disrupted economic flows around the world. All of a sudden, the little nation-states of the Gulf are looking less like havens and more like death traps. Iran itself is now in danger of becoming a failed state, with an even more radicalized Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps determined to undermine stability in the Middle East. Indeed, Trump, infuriated by Tehran’s continued resistance, threatened on Truth Social on March 10 to “make it virtually impossible for Iran to ever be built back, as a Nation, again – Death, Fire, and Fury will reign upon them.”
The war has also given new life and hope to another disastrously failed nation-state, Russia, as well as a nation-state that might be working better than Russia economically but is designed to permanently deprive its 1.4 billion citizens of the most basic rights, China.
Yet Dasgupta concedes that, as morbid as nation-states may be, they aren’t going away and “in some respects they are more lugubriously robust than ever.”
In casting his eye toward the future, Dasgupta grasps at the forlorn hope that the very liberalism that sprang from this tainted Western past can still be relied on—as long as it can be transmuted into a more all-embracing universalism. Because, he writes, “every alternative philosophy portends a much darker future”—an adaptation of Churchill’s famous saying: “Democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”
Dasgupta hopes for some new “apparatus” that will be “distributed also across local and transnational institutions.” But he has no clear answer as to what that might be. Straining credulity to the breaking point, he writes that the very same international law being shredded today by Trump, Putin, and others can be resurrected and refashioned in some form by some unknown agency—thereby becoming “an international law that subordinates the violent apparatus of individual states to some universal purpose.”
But he says “this law cannot be derived from any state, or from any consortium of states. States are the criminals; they cannot also make the law.”
Huh? It is all but impossible to imagine how such law might be imposed, barring a takeover by aliens or a dictate from a suddenly engaged God Almighty. Consider the pariah status of the International Criminal Court, whose rulings are ignored by the major powers.
Dasgupta acknowledges that neither a world state nor its opposite, a kind of libertarian “network state” (a “highly aligned online community with a capacity for collective action,” in the words of one of its advocates, tech entrepreneur Balaji Srinivasan), is going to be feasible or advisable. Like today’s nation-state, the network state concept seems to promote minority rule by a global elite—a “quasi-feudal leadership endowed with sweeping powers of surveillance and expropriation,” writes Dasgupta. But a “society without tax, without care, without shared freedoms and responsibilities”—that is, the characteristics of this theoretical network state—“is no society at all.”
Other suggested solutions to the new world disorder are equally meager. “The task is how to manage the transition to multipolarity without creating the kind of spheres of influence for Great Powers that are based solely on might making right,” writes Westad. Sure, that sounds good, but Xi and Putin plainly want those spheres of influence, and Trump appears too unconcerned and the Europeans too weak to do anything about it.
Prasad advises that we must “enshrine core principles like fairness, transparency, and flexibility as foundational elements to ensure that our institutions retain legitimacy”—without saying how any of that is supposed to happen. For all of these writers, this is something that simply must happen because “the stakes are simply too high,” as Prasad writes.
As for Milanovic, he too sees a hopeless clash of nationalisms that “grows on the terrain of never-satiated mass plenty and greed.” And things look so grim to him that he doesn’t think that the nationalist hysteria of Trump or his right-wing fellow travelers around the world makes much of a difference, writing that “when we try to see a hypothetical future that would exist if Donald Trump, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin suddenly left the scene, it does not seem that the coming times would look that different.”
People walking past a poster of a person wearing VR goggles and sitting in a futuristic circular chair surrounded by digital screens.
People walk past a banner displaying digital knowledge and artificial intelligence technology at the Frankfurt Book Fair in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, on Oct. 16, 2024. Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP via Getty Images
Depressed enough yet? Perhaps you shouldn’t be. Some of this pessimism is overdone and ill-founded, just as these authors’ purported solutions generally don’t hold up. As Trump seeks to destroy what’s left of the “West,” both Dasgupta and Milanovic, for example, suggest that an alternative international community could be formed around the BRICS-plus grouping fostered by Beijing: Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, joined recently by Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Indonesia, Ethiopia, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates. But BRICS is hardly the “decisive political bloc” Dasgupta makes it out to be—especially in the wake of the Iran war.
And despite Milanovic’s grim prognosis of a world irrevocably divided, there is still a middle ground between a China that won’t accept U.S. hegemony and a China that finds a way to work within the global system as it exists.
Maybe the most hopeful thing to say is that we, as a species, have no idea what’s coming around the bend, especially when we consider the most revolutionary development of the new century: rapidly advancing artificial intelligence. For that and many other reasons, the differences between the pre-World War I world and today’s situation are—let’s face it—far greater than the similarities, as even Westad admits.
The prevailing view of AI, of course, is also one of fear and loathing: the idea that it is advancing so fast we humans are all but doomed. There are dangers aplenty in this epoch-making trend:,lost jobs, lost volition, lost critical thinking—a lost sense of human agency altogether.
But we simply don’t know where all this new tech is going to take us as a species, and perhaps one hope lies in the idea that we are transcending ourselves—our foibles, our antagonisms, and our prejudice—as people. And a lot of that could happen through AI, if it’s used wisely. “It is likely that machine perspectives will be more naturally global than those of professional politicians,” Dasgupta writes. “AI will be used to analyse complex planetary interactions, and will have a clear sense, therefore, that national futures depend on a much more systemic form of stability.”
Amid all the fears about the future of AI, there is also a great deal of hope that it can be transformative for the human race. In his 2024 book The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI, tech guru Ray Kurzweil writes that advanced AI will soon turn plodding, “linear” progress in many fields—from medicine to agriculture to manufacturing—into “exponential” advancement. That may prove true of politics as well. On one hand, AI has the ability to give authoritarian states unprecedented levels of control through AI-assisted surveillance. But it also has the potential to bring unprecedented levels of education and learning, for a few dollars a month, to great masses of humans who were deprived of it before.
And should we really be lamenting the advancing judgement of new generations of AI when our own judgement—human judgement, that is—appears to have hit a wall?
The future, in other words, is completely unknowable—except to say we’re fairly sure at this point it’s not going to continue on the same path, either geopolitically or technologically, that we’ve been on since World War II.
Above all, the postwar world system has outgrown its progenitor, the United States. Perhaps nothing is more compelling than Dasgupta’s recent observation that Americans’ “intellectual grasp of what’s going on in the world is hugely diminished.” This is no longer a problem of the average undereducated American; now it is our elites in Washington who don’t understand the system that their forebears designed. And that is likely the most decisive death sentence of all to the old system.
No one knows what the answer is. But that doesn’t mean that an answer we can’t possibly anticipate, for good or ill, isn’t going to make its appearance—and perhaps soon.
