Republic of Congo’s minerals—or Brazil’s? If the world is zero-sum, nothing is to be gained from being a good international citizen, only from taking out what you can. Suspecting that America will no longer make a fuss, and that the UN’s bark has lost any residual bite, leaders will dust off plans to settle scores with their neighbours. China has disputed territorial claims on reefs and shoals and rocky outcrops against just about every maritime state in Asia. Cambodia and Thailand repeatedly snipe in the Dangrek Mountains. Turkey occupies parts of northern Syria. Israel has created buffer zones all around its frontiers. Many of Africa’s ruled-line borders, drafted in distant capitals by imperial administrators, defy local logic. Leaders who hold back out of respect for the rules will not get any thanks. Instead they may miss their chance. A breaking international system will reward predators, just as a successful one used to suppress them. By helping Mr Putin fight Ukraine Kim Jong Un, North Korea’s pariah president, has clawed back influence with Russia and China. Everywhere, a paranoid scramble for security will set off arms races. When Iran struck its neighbours in the Gulf, America was unable to protect them fully. They will now have to find ways either to defend themselves, to deter Iran, or (more likely) both. And so Iran, feeling threatened itself, will invest in yet more weapons—and the cycle will repeat itself. Such security dilemmas are already infecting nuclear policy. The era of nuclear-arms control is over; the New START treaty between America and Russia lapsed in February, leaving both sides free to move weapons from storage to active duty. Russia has issued nuclear threats as part of its war against Ukraine, a dangerous blurring between nuclear and non-nuclear warfare. China is massively expanding its arsenal, and standing in the way of arms talks. The prospects for proliferation look just as worrying. In 1963 President Kennedy said he was “haunted” by the dread that in the 1970s, 15, 20 or 25 countries could get nuclear weapons. More than 60 years later, the ranks of the nuclear powers have merely grown from four to nine; and if five have
joined the ranks permanently, four others gave up their weapons. Some of this was down to targeted counter-proliferation efforts; some was down to the belief that peace could be maintained without them, sometimes under an explicit nuclear umbrella, sometimes not. With its security guaranteed by the international rules-based order, what need had the Ukraine of 1994 for nukes it inherited from the Soviet Union? The Iran war has thrown into doubt the ability of even an unfettered America to stop proliferation by force. The Wrecking-ball revolution is making countries devoid of previous nuclear ambitions newly interested in peace through that hideous strength. If Mr Trump sneers at America’s allies —even the closest—why would he go nuclear on behalf of any of them? Acquiring nuclear weapons takes time and money. Paul van Hooft, head of the deterrence initiative at RAND Europe, a think-tank, says countries may soon be able to save both with conventional alternatives. By the early 2030s those with the know-how and willingness to spend could have large numbers of conventional weapons able to make precision strikes deep inside enemy territory. And within Europe the two existing nuclear deterrents might be shared more explicitly. Countries which nevertheless seek a bomb of their own know that there is no more dangerous time than that between their schemes being detected and their deterrent being in place. Minimising that window means having detailed design work done in advance and stocks of civilian nuclear material ready for quick repurposing. Brad Roberts, a former Pentagon official, points out that East Asian nuclear plants have a surprising number of supercomputers. “They have legitimate functions, I’m sure,” he insists. “But you have to wonder what other functions they’ve had.” Dr van Hooft warns that if a number of states sprint for a bomb, things get hairy—all the more so if they plan to use existing deep-strike systems to deliver them. “I think the likelihood of war goes up,” he says, “and the likelihood of one of those wars involving a nuclear-armed state, involving the use of a nuclear weapon or two, those all go up.” He stresses that this does not mean a planet-destroying conflagration. But even if the fallout from the first nuclear weapons fired in anger since 1945 were small in absolute
terms, it would be as symbolically potent as the layer of iridium-laced clay which caps off the age of the dinosaurs. “It’s a pretty dark picture,” says Joel Rosenthal, president of the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, another think-tank. “I don’t really see a way out of it. I just see mitigation, not prevention.” AMERICA’S NEXT leaders will discover that securing a new order is a lot harder than demolishing the old one. Under the careless hand of Mr Trump, the Wrecking-ball revolution got under way without much heed to what would come next—a bit like the demolition of the East Wing of the White House. He will not, in the end, be the man to determine what, if anything, should take its place. Despite the clear evidence that it is happening, it is still in some ways hard to believe that America set about the demolition at all. Whatever Mr Trump, his lieutenants and their apologists say, the system their country created after the second world war brought it vast benefits over the best part of a century —permanent mechanisms with which to exert influence, stability on its own terms, the economic gains which come from being the anchor of the financial system, open markets and the conditions for its companies to thrive in them. And absence of great-power war.
For Americans to knock this down, therefore, may seem a morbid symptom of decline—the external face of the decay of its values and politics at home, a predatory hegemony begot of a failing democracy. The alternative view, though, is that a new order will emerge in which America continues to lead, and that this revolution will instead come to stand for the country’s extraordinary dynamism and powers of renewal. It would be a remarkable reversal. New orders usually emerge from conquest and conflagration. It took the horrors of the Thirty Years War, one of the most devastating conflicts in Europe’s history, to bring about in 1648 the peace of Westphalia—and with it the concept of the sovereign state, the fundamental notion on which geopolitics is founded. There would have been no Concert of Europe for Metternich to conduct without the Napoleonic wars, no nations to unite in 1945 without the defeat of Hitler. America’s leaders are trying to impose a new—if still Westphalian—order even as their own politics is convulsed by populism, a disruptive new technology promises to upend every part of modern life and a risen China is itching to exert control over East Asia and influence over everything. Instinct says that if such a thing is to be done successfully it must be undertaken slowly. America and China, on whose relationship so much else rests, need to feel their way towards a co-existence that both can tolerate, one which is based on a shared understanding of their relative strengths. There is some comfort, in this respect, to be taken from Zhao Tong, who works at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He believes that China’s leaders are not in a rush. They have been so preoccupied with weakening America’s leadership that they have given less thought to the shape of the order that would follow. They wish to continue accumulating power, and that will take time—which might let the two sides gradually, through probing and diplomacy, arrive at an accommodation. But for a balance of power to bring a new order it must do more than satisfy the two main actors. It must also bring stability to others or be flexible enough to encompass change. It must offer something of what Britain brought to 19th-century Europe through policies which sought to preserve the status quo by ensuring no country could dominate. Wars still happened, but their goal, as Henry Kissinger put it, was equilibrium, not total conquest.
Unfortunately, as Dr Fukuyama points out, using small wars to recalibrate the balance of power in a world studded with nuclear weapons will court catastrophe. How such a system could function is a mystery. “I’m scared,” he admits. Dr Westad sees a growing temptation for ambitious, ruthless or reckless leaders to act fast so as to get what they want while they still can. “That’s seriously why I am worried,” he says. Like those of 1776, 1789 and 1848, the Wrecking-ball revolution has already taken on a life of its own. The constant, overwhelming fear will be that the forces which have broken free will not stop until the wreckage is complete.■ This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//interactive/essay/2026/07/02/the-wrecking-ball- revolution
Hope, backlash and the battle for America July 2nd 2026 2006-09Too big to fail In August 2006 we called America’s housing market “the biggest bubble in American history” (not boasting, just stating facts; remember, we’re British). But even we could not imagine the cataclysmic events to come. Cheap credit and aggressive lending to high-risk, or “subprime”, borrowers were fuelling demand, driving up house prices. Banks were bundling these risky mortgages into complex securities, obscuring the underlying risk. In 2007, when house prices dropped, many borrowers defaulted. Mortgage-backed securities suddenly lost value, hitting banks hard. In March 2008 Bear Stearns, America’s fifth-largest investment bank, collapsed. Six months later Lehman Brothers, the fourth-largest, filed for bankruptcy. The financial system seemed on the verge of unravelling.