It’s looking increasingly likely that the last 35 years or so will come to be seen as an Interregnum between two world orders: the Cold War order, which emerged from the ashes of World War Two, and whatever it is that is beginning to envelop us now. The question is whether what is enveloping us will become the new order, or if an alternative to it can be imagined into existence, and soon.
The first and second failures
The Cold War order pitted two global blocs — the liberal capitalist one led by the U.S. and its allies, and the ostensibly socialist one led by the Soviet Politburo in Moscow — against each other in a kind of “profoundly unstable stability,” a relationship of hostility tempered by the threat of mutually assured nuclear destruction. Ultimately that order fell apart due to the internal and external contradictions of the Socialist bloc. That bloc’s main internal contradiction was between the equality and prosperity it promised its people, and the authoritarianism of its centrally planned socialist economic practice, which failed to deliver that promise. Its main external threat was its western opponent, against whom it felt a need to build up a massive defense system that taxed its own capacities to the max. By 1991, the Socialist bloc seemed to have clearly lost that struggle, with liberal democracy (or democratic capitalism) triumphing.
The Interregnum has been a time when the seemingly victorious liberal democratic world was in a position to build a more lasting, relatively peaceable world. It had the means to do this — by strengthening the international order of sovereign nation-states, international agreements, and rule of law, and by skillfully addressing its own challenges. But now, in 2025, it seems clear that it has failed, and that this is due in part to its own central internal contradiction.
That contradiction is between the democracy and general prosperity it has promised and the capitalism it has harbored. For all of its productiveness, capitalism generates huge costs to its environment — which means to all of those people, lands, and ecological systems it treats as resources and not as equal partners. The costs eventually come to haunt it — in such forms as climate change and biospheric deterioration, as well as in the disgruntlement of those who don’t share in its benefits. They become both its external and its internal enemy.
The contradiction exists because capitalism tends to benefit the most active “capitalizers,” and the wealth it generates for them is easily convertible into power. When that power is not sufficiently shared — through the democracy it touts — but is instead used to prop up the inequalities it naturally generates, and when the costs are not internalized into the system — so that they become additional strains on everyone, and especially on its non-beneficiaries — the contradiction becomes a mortal danger to the system.
Add to that some disastrous decisions of wealthy power-holders — the Clinton administration’s failure to steer the post Cold War world into a welcoming place for the former USSR and its satellites, Bush’s Iraq War (which historian Dominic Sandbrook astutely calls a “uniquely disastrous and toxic” event for the image of the West), the reckless overconfidence that led to the 2008 financial débacle — and here we are.
The multi-imperial hydra
That internal contradiction is playing itself out in the dynamics of the world system today, which are reconfiguring geopolitical power into a highly unstable, or at best a flimsily “polystable,” multipolar world in which rival neo-imperial forces will struggle against each other for resources, wealth, and power.
If the Trump administration succeeds in its goal of weakening not only the West but the institutions of the international order, it will strengthen its “great power” peers, which today are Russia and China. From a (non-Trumpian) U.S. perspective, this seems an unnecessary realignment, as the external threats to U.S. leadership are not quite strong enough to overcome it. Its contradictions are internal, and they are the same contradictions as face the whole system: between capitalism and democracy, but exacerbated. It is those contradictions that have generated Donald Trump, the MAGA movement, and the Muskian techno-authoritarian swerve.
And it appears to be Trump’s goal to empower those neo-imperial peers, as he prefers to deal with them directly, or with the “strongmen” who lead them, and not to have to worry about rules, institutional process, or the many “bit players” on the world stage — Ukrainians, Taiwanese, Canadians, Greenlanders and Norwegians, Panamaniams, and so on. (The Trumpists’ attraction to Moscow are plentifully evident by now, though it may take a Jon Stewart to call it in a way that most U.S. pundits still cannot.)
If Trump succeeds in tearing apart the post Cold War order of sovereign nation-states and international agreements, he will be ushering in another order, one dominated by authoritarian, imperial forces competing or transactionally cooperating with each other for short-term gain. He will, by this token, have destroyed the capacities for international cooperation that had been built over the last 80 years. To the extent that the new order is not likely to give rise to benevolent dictators, it will more likely lead to chaos, and quite possibly to the destruction of humanity.
Opposition to this order exists, however, and it can be found in every still (more or less) democratic nation-state, and in movements around the world that would gravitate toward an alternative. That opposition can grow and become more coordinated and more capable of acting globally. What’s missing right now — what’s not articulated well today, and has few prominent representatives at the global level — is the attractor of an alternative.
The clarity of realignment
I wrote a piece a few days ago on the Trump-Zelensky oval office meeting, in which I argued that Zelensky fell into a trap set-up by the Trump administration’s reality-TV “imperial” spectacle, but that he also succeeded in demonstrating that truths need not cave in to imperial demands based on lies or half-truths. The latter is playing out fairly well for his Zelensky’s home audience, where his support remains high (contrary to Trump’s ridiculous assertions). It has garnered warm responses among the opposition to Trump (I love the deepfakes circulating of a reimagined Trump-Zelensky encounter). More importantly, it is beginning to get similar responses in places one may not expect it — as for instance in long-time Indian Communist Party activist Kavita Krishnan’s piece in The Hindu, “Multiple bullies at work, out to create a ‘multipolar world’” (which I described here).
Much of the global left, as Krishnan notes there, remains trapped within the old Cold War frame, in which “western imperialism” was seen as a worse imperialism than any other — and typically as the only imperialism — and critique of any non-western regimes was always tempered by a defense of their right, and even their daring, to take a different path to the West’s liberal capitalist order. Ironically, it’s that frame, with its exclusive critique of NATO and the west, and its defense of “the rest,” that has effectively migrated from the left to the populist far right, where it’s taken on the forms currently on display in the Trump administration.
In the order that’s rapidly forming around us, that Cold War frame no longer makes sense. The spectacle of Zelensky, a western ally in the midst of a semi-genocidal war by neo-imperial Russia, being berated by the ostensible “leader of the free world” — has put the lie to the very notion of a unified, hegemonic world that some take to be “free” and others take to be merely imperialist (and at the same time the only imperialist).
To use Trump’s own card-play metaphor, we should be able to see now how the deck is stacked. Trump has cards, Putin has them, and it will be evident that Xi has them. The smaller players around the world — and in fact the democratic institution-bearers around the world — are being rapidly deprived of them. As the card holders scramble for resources — “old” resources like gas and oil and “new” ones like lithium and rare earth metals, in newly opening territories from eastern Ukraine and the Black Sea to the circumpolar Arctic (which is why Trump is so keen on Canada and Greenland) — the possibilities for democracy, social justice, and ecological justice, are being rapidly dismantled.
It doesn’t have to be this way. The clarity of this realignment could bring the rest of us together in a way that would end this beginning of the end of the Interregnum. To do that, however, we need a vision that would triumph over it, a vision that’s stronger than the vacuity of a mere interregnum. It should be a vision that reasserts democracy (with all its complications), freedom (including the freedom for a place, nation, or region to do things its own way), justice (including the idea that grotesque levels of wealth should be as much a thing of the past as grotesque levels of poverty), and the global solidarity that could address our climate and ecological challenges together, because that’s the only way they can possibly be addressed.
Formulating, clarifying, and articulating that vision remains the great task ahead for us. But it is built from our efforts today (efforts that, in the U.S. at least, are being documented by Heather Cox Richardson, Rebecca Solnit, Rachel Maddow, and the others I documented on my recent list of resources).
The technical and visionary tasks
The wild card in the picture is technology. If we allow the most powerful new technologies — digital communications, artificial intelligence, and others — to be controlled by oligarchs working hand in hand with imperial leaders, then we will have abdicated our responsibility to ourselves and to our future. That’s why I’ve called for a revolution in the means of information. At this point those means are largely controlled and certainly dominated by Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Elon Musk, and their allies, propagandists, and political technologists everywhere.
Our task, in that light, is to learn how to work the media as they exist today — in the same way that Trump has learned to do that, acting as a shaman-hog of global attention (my talk discussing that will appear on the Digital Democracies Institute video site soon) — even as we work to institute mechanisms that would regulate and tame those media, bending them to public accountability and not just private profit. We’ve been here before with other technologies — coal and oil, shipping and railroads, radio and television, which all began as a “wild west” of dramatic overexploitation, but were all reined in to somewhat manageable degrees. We can do that again.
The vision of an alternative, and the technical means of communicating it: those are the twin challenges of our time, for those who believe there is an alternative to global disaster.
