general-purpose technologies such as AI often favour those who are best at diffusing them through the economy, not those that invent them. At present America, number one in the world at AI invention, is only 21st at diffusion. Leads can slip away. “It’s not like this race ends,” says Mr Smith. “People act like you win the race, get the gold medal, and that’s worth something.” Mr Smith also doubts that the government will choose to weaponise AI. His company does 45% of its business outside America. “We cannot be successful without those customers, and those customers are all globally interconnected themselves,” he says. For America to thrive, American businesses must thrive. For American businesses to thrive they must thrive in Europe, in Asia, in Latin America. But if the wrecking ball fails to go all the way, that does not mean that the accumulated rubble gets rebuilt. America’s revolution has triggered reactions that no change in Washington can easily reverse. European attitudes have hardened. Since Mr Trump’s threats in January to seize Greenland from Denmark, MAGA has become so disliked that even populist nationalists feel the need to take a stand. “Trump has been progressively losing his cards,” says Nathalie Tocci, an Italian scholar. The EU has accelerated trade agreements with Australia, India, Indonesia, Mercosur and Mexico. As Mr Trump’s influence over Ukraine has drained away, Europe’s has grown. Germany’s defence spending has doubled since 2023. Its target is to reach 3.5% of GDP by 2029, three times its low in 2015. Europe needs to build military mass and systems which can both use it effectively and deploy it quickly. If Vladimir Putin mobilises Russian troops, says Camille Grand, a former French official who served in NATO, Europeans “have to be able to provide the cavalry”. Asian democracies are also trying to build stronger regional alliances. “We need to fill the vacuum the US has been creating in our neighbourhood, particularly South-East Asia,” says Ishii Masafumi, a former Japanese diplomat. He favours an elaborate programme of engagement with countries across the region. The key will be making common cause with the big,

populous and fast-growing ones. In GDP terms, Indonesia will be bigger than Japan in just 20 years. The strongest call for vacuum-filling was the one issued by Mark Carney, Canada’s prime minister, at the World Economic Forum in Davos last January. He told other “middle powers” that there was no alternative: “If we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu.” And indeed, there is a theory in international relations which says that, although a hegemon is needed to build an order, lesser powers can sustain one. The argument is that order produces real economic benefits by co-ordinating the provision of public goods: setting standards in areas such as air-traffic control; enforcing agreements over things like freedom of navigation; developing the confidence that the world will run smoothly. That gives other countries good reason to step in when America abandons its sponsorship of institutions they value, as they did to salvage a Pacific trade deal now known as the CPTPP. Unfortunately such hegemon-free arrangements tend to be unstable. “At some point somebody’s going to decide they want to break out of it, or they want to break the rules, or the rules don’t apply to them,” says Dr Fukuyama. Without someone to force renegades back in, the system breaks down. Especially if the erstwhile enforcer is on the outside singing the praises of the renegade life. Nor are all middle powers necessarily keen on the idea. Team Carney can expect little help within in its own hemisphere. Latin America is being Trumpified one country at a time. The right has won all seven of the presidential elections there since the beginning of 2025. Resisting America’s agenda is not on the cards. Across the Atlantic many in the EU have Carneyite sympathies. But their own institutions make painfully clear how hard it is for a collection of powers to co-ordinate. Its 27 members have developed complex procedures in a bid to make collective government efficient. Even after decades of institution-building, they struggle to work fast. Dr Tocci argues that methods built for peace are ill-suited to times of conflict.

Asian countries, for their part, tend to see the middle-power idea as a dangerous Western illusion. They do not believe that they can withstand China without American help. “There is no possibility of countering China without the United States,” says John Lee, a former adviser to Australia’s foreign minister. “Ultimately, Asian allies will do and give what it takes to preserve that American balance.” That said, if America seeks some sort of reform, it may be able to work with the smaller powers to hold the system together. Some of those powers understand that a modified American primacy would give them a weight and agency that other arrangements do not. Therefore they may reduce the scale of what they expect from America, making a new, less partisan foreign policy there more plausible. Meanwhile their demands for dependability might help those forging that American policy to further their goals at home. “The US is going to have to earn its way back into institutions and practices it has abandoned,” says Dr Schake. “We’re going to have to prove ourselves trustworthy and others are going to tell us when we’re failing.” Look back again, though, to 1848. The revolutions foundered; but Europe never restored the conservative order, based on the divine right of monarchs, that Klemens von Metternich had established at the Congress of Vienna. Instead, Otto von Bismarck sought stability from the manipulation of power. In the same way, if the wrecking ball is stayed from completing its destructive work, a new equilibrium could see America still dominant. But the ties would be shallower; if wariness limited commitment, they would be less useful. WHEN LOUIS XVI locked the National Assembly out of its meeting rooms in 1789 a Parisian doctor with an interest in the reform of capital punishment proposed that they simply move their deliberations to a nearby tennis court. There they swore that they would not stop those deliberations until the job of providing France with a new constitution had been completed. It was all very reasonable. It took just four years for the revolution to descend into the Terror, during which the Committee of Public Safety beheaded almost 17,000 people using the contraption first proposed by that very reasonable doctor, Joseph-Ignace Guillotin.

The instigators of the Wrecking-ball revolution may not wish it to descend into anarchy and violence, any more than Guillotin intended his commitment to more humane execution to lead to mass murder. But Mr Trump has set in motion a juggernaut neither he nor any other world leader will be able to control. His contemptuous treatment of allies and principles—and his indulgence of dictators and rule-breaking—has greased its axles. An unhappy, anarchic and violent end is all too possible. Many countries are resentful of the order now passing, some with good reason. China and Russia, like the wrecking-ballistas, are actively working against it. Russia has become a pariah that invades, interferes, sabotages, murders and then protects itself by hiding behind the rules it has just trampled. Its hypocrisy is deeply corrosive. China is more deliberate, because it wants to erode America’s control without causing so much mayhem that it is obliged to help clear things up. Its threats to withhold exports of rare earths, which it dominates, are putting the world trading system under intolerable strain. It is setting up a shadow governance system of development banks and political forums which cannot replace the old order, but can help with its fragmentation. The chaos will spread as the forces that once drew the world together increasingly pull it apart. Eswar Prasad of Cornell University used to think that the overall economic and security benefits created by globalisation would offset leaders’ reluctance to make concessions. He now fears that globalisation has become tainted. “Not only are we not getting those benefits,” he says, “but that stabilising force versus the zero-sum game of politics is gone.” The recent book in which he makes his case is called “The Doom Loop”.

Dr Prasad observes that populist leaders blame trade for destroying jobs, whereas technology usually plays a much bigger part. Technologies such as AI and crypto are empowering small rogue states and domestic troublemakers. Dollar dependence stabilises economies in the short run, but exposes them to rich-world sanctions and punishing capital flight in a crisis. He worries that, if ever economies need emergency dollar liquidity, Mr Trump may seek to exploit his leverage to extract concessions. As norms collapse, countries will produce innovations under stress, seizing on opportunities that would once have been too risky. China’s move on rare earths is one such example. Iran’s grabbing control of the Strait of Hormuz, and its attacks on its neighbours’ energy infrastructure, are another. Although denying ships safe passage is illegal, the Islamic Republic will not give up its new prize willingly. For the foreseeable future the threat of a renewed blockade will hang over the strait like a loitering drone. As Mr Trump has monetised his alliances, so Iran will seek to pay for its reconstruction through transit fees. Other chokepoints, geographical or metaphorical, will also be up for exploitation. Who will control the Panama Canal, the Northern Sea Route, Bab al-Mandab or the Strait of Malacca? Will the Netherlands exert leverage thanks to its lead in lithography or Taiwan through its world-beating wafer fabs? What of the Democratic