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.
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