No one has done more than Donald Trump to assert the \u201cprimacy of nations\u201d in today\u2019s 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\u2014including Russian President Vladimir Putin, Chinese leader Xi Jinping, Hungary\u2019s Viktor Orban, and insurgent right-wing parties around the globe.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
The problem, however, is that the nation-state is badly broken and no longer working for average people around the world.<\/p>\n
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<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n And since Trump and his like-minded nationalists also hate globalism or any idea of international governance that leaves most people\u2014the 99.75 percent of human beings on the planet who live in nation-states\u2014with little to protect them and promote their pursuit of happiness.<\/p>\n The human race today is \u201cpolitically naked,\u201d concludes Dasgupta, a prominent essayist and novelist, in his compelling and brilliantly researched\u2014if decidedly anti-Western\u2014book.<\/p>\n The \u201cnation-state system falls short of the most commonsensical conceptions of equality and justice,\u201d he writes. \u201cSince nation-states have monopolised our political life, that betrayal is existential: we have nothing else.\u201d As a result, \u201cthe sensation of progress\u201d developed over many centuries has been \u201creplaced by the anxiety of futurelessness.\u201d<\/p>\n This foreboding sense of \u201cfuturelessness\u201d 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\u2014but which are instead faltering or failing themselves.<\/p>\n For the economist Eswar Prasad, the world is caught in \u201cthe doom loop<\/a>\u201d\u2014the title of his book\u2014in 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<\/em><\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n Another kind of imminent global disaster animates The Great Global Transformation: The United States, China, and the Remaking of the World Economic Order<\/a>.<\/em> In it, the progressive economist Branko Milanovic writes of a new global order stemming from the rise of China. Its \u201ccontours are only dimly apprehended today,\u201d but this new order is destined to pit the United States and China against each other.<\/p>\n \u201cChina is simply unabsorbable in the current US-led system,\u201d Milanovic concludes. That suggests a state of \u201cincipient political unrest\u201d not unlike the pre-World War I environment.<\/p>\n 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<\/span> <\/p>\n<\/div>\n It is true that the \u201csensation of progress\u201d has all but disappeared in the West. In the United States and in Europe\u2014the West, in other words\u2014we 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\u2014a 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\u2019s autocratic exercise of power, the checks and balances of the system\u2014the Constitution itself\u2014seem to be failing.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n And if empire is now the goal, with the U.S. president launching unprovoked wars from Venezuela to Iran, Americans aren\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n Europe, meanwhile, can\u2019t seem to fulfill what was once a common postwar hope for its own more perfect union\u2014even in the face of what many Europeans see as an existential threat from Russia. Instead, the European Union has a permanent \u201cincompleteness\u201d problem, as Josef Janning wrote<\/a> last year, adding that \u201cEuropean policymakers appear to have shelved the idea of a big step forward.\u201d Despite a recent show of unity over Trump\u2019s 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\u2019s consensus-driven machinery has led mainly to \u201cparalysis,\u201d Douglas Rediker and Heidi Crebo-Rediker wrote<\/a> recently.<\/p>\n All in all, then, it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n After Nations: The Making and Unmaking of a World Orde<\/strong><\/em>r<\/a>, Rana Dasgupta, Viking, 496 pp., $35, April 2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n 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\u2014the very concept of the nation-state and international law\u2014have been fatally tainted from their beginnings.<\/p>\n Dating from the Spanish conquest of Latin America, Western scholars developed international law mainly to further \u201cprivate interests, whose concerns have usually been acquisitive,\u201d Dasgupta writes.<\/p>\n The writings of Hugo Grotius\u2014the \u201cacknowledged father\u201d of international law\u2014were 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. \u201cLockean 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,\u201d Dasgupta writes.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cwas too imperial, too partial and too Christian to function as a universal faith,\u201d Dasgupta writes.<\/p>\n T<\/strong>he Coming Storm: Power, Conflict, and Warnings From History<\/strong><\/em><\/a>, Odd Arne Westad, Henry Holt and Co., 256 pp., $27.99, March 2026\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n For Dasgupta, Westad, and most of these other authors, the main obstacle to any future progress\u2014and the chief solvent pulling the world apart\u2014is the cult of the nation-state. \u201cFrom Xi Jinping\u2019s quest to regain China\u2019s glory, to Vladimir Putin\u2019s attempts at a new Russian empire, to the rise of populist anti-foreign attitudes in the United States, Britain, Germany, and France,\u201d writes Westad, \u201csuch sentiments make major war more possible,\u201d much as in the pre-1914 era.<\/p>\n 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. \u201cWe are shocked, even today, to see how quickly that notion unraveled in July 1914,\u201d Westad writes. \u201cThere 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.\u201d<\/p>\n Beyond that, given the vast array of today\u2019s lethal technology\u2014expanding nuclear arsenals, hypersonic missiles, biowarfare, AI-driven orbital bombardment systems<\/a>, and the like\u2014anything on the scale of another World War I would probably end up being World War Done. Game over, human race.<\/p>\n 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<\/span> <\/p>\n<\/div>\n Unfortunately, most of these new doomsaying books tend to make compelling cases for what\u2019s gone wrong while supplying weak or nonexistent solutions for how to make things right. And the authors, for the most part, don\u2019t do a very good job of seeing around the next bend.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n 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\u2019t fully buy into the zealous neoliberalism of the post-Cold War era\u2014the myth of unfettered capitalism-as-panacea\u2014are still delivering a better quality of life and relatively more social equity. Among them: Japan, the Nordic nations, Canada, and Australia.<\/p>\n What is <\/em>worrisome is the condition of the really big nation-states, what you might call the world-historical ones. In particular, it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n Ironically, the American people\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2014and 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\u2014a number getting smaller all the time, thanks to artificial intelligence\u2014and 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.<\/p>\n The bottom line is that a smaller number of U.S. oligarchs\u2014many of whom have made their way, obsequiously, to Trump\u2019s White House, to do his bidding\u2014control a much larger proportion of the U.S. economy even as they\u2019re less responsible for the country\u2019s overall prosperity and social stability.<\/p>\n And the great unwinding of the global system has only accelerated in the aftermath of Trump\u2019s 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\u2019s continued resistance, threatened <\/a>on Truth Social on March 10 to\u00a0\u201cmake it virtually impossible for Iran to ever be built back, as a Nation, again \u2013 Death, Fire, and Fury will reign upon them.\u201d<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Yet Dasgupta concedes that, as morbid as nation-states may be, they aren\u2019t going away and \u201cin some respects they are more lugubriously robust than ever.\u201d<\/p>\n 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\u2014as long as it can be transmuted into a more all-embracing universalism. Because, he writes, \u201cevery alternative philosophy portends a much darker future\u201d\u2014an adaptation of Churchill\u2019s famous saying: \u201cDemocracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.\u201d<\/p>\n Dasgupta hopes for some new \u201capparatus\u201d that will be \u201cdistributed also across local and transnational institutions.\u201d 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\u2014thereby becoming \u201can international law that subordinates the violent apparatus of individual states to some universal purpose.\u201d<\/p>\n But he says \u201cthis law cannot be derived from any state, or from any consortium of states. States are the criminals; they cannot also make the law.\u201d<\/p>\n 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 \u00a0rulings are ignored by the major powers.<\/p>\n Dasgupta acknowledges that neither a world state nor its opposite, a kind of libertarian \u201cnetwork state\u201d (a \u201chighly aligned online community with a capacity for collective action,\u201d in the words of one of its advocates, tech entrepreneur Balaji Srinivasan), is going to be feasible or advisable. Like today\u2019s nation-state, the network state concept seems to promote minority rule by a global elite\u2014a \u201cquasi-feudal leadership endowed with sweeping powers of surveillance and expropriation,\u201d writes Dasgupta. But a \u201csociety without tax, without care, without shared freedoms and<\/em> responsibilities\u201d\u2014that is, the characteristics of this theoretical network state\u2014\u201cis no society at all.\u201d<\/p>\n The Doom Loop: Why the World Economic Order Is Spiraling Into Disorder<\/strong><\/em><\/a>, Eswar Prasad, Basic Venture, 368 pp., $32, February 2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Other suggested solutions to the new world disorder are equally meager. \u201cThe 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,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n Prasad advises that we must \u201censhrine core principles like fairness, transparency, and flexibility as foundational elements to ensure that our institutions retain legitimacy\u201d\u2014without saying how any of that is supposed to happen. For all of these writers, this is something that simply must <\/em>happen because \u201cthe stakes are simply too high,\u201d as Prasad writes.<\/p>\n As for Milanovic, he too sees a hopeless clash of nationalisms that \u201cgrows on the terrain of never-satiated mass plenty and greed.\u201d And things look so grim to him that he doesn\u2019t think that the nationalist hysteria of Trump or his right-wing fellow travelers around the world makes much of a difference, writing that \u201cwhen 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.\u201d<\/p>\n 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<\/span> <\/p>\n<\/div>\n Depressed enough yet? Perhaps you shouldn\u2019t be. Some of this pessimism is overdone and ill-founded, just as these authors\u2019 purported solutions generally don\u2019t hold up. As Trump seeks to destroy what\u2019s left of the \u201cWest,\u201d 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 \u201cdecisive political bloc\u201d Dasgupta makes it out to be\u2014especially in the wake of the Iran war<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n And despite Milanovic\u2019s grim prognosis of a world irrevocably divided, there is still a middle ground<\/a> between a China that won\u2019t accept U.S. hegemony and a China that finds a way to work within the global system as it exists.<\/p>\n The Great Global Transformation: The United States, China, and the Remaking of the World Economic Order<\/strong><\/em><\/a>, Branko Milanovic, University of Chicago, 280 pp., $30, March 2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Maybe the most hopeful thing to say is that we, as a species, have no idea what\u2019s 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\u2019s situation are\u2014let\u2019s face it\u2014far greater than the similarities, as even Westad admits.<\/p>\n 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\u2014a lost sense of human agency altogether.<\/p>\n But we simply don\u2019t 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\u2014our foibles, our antagonisms, and our prejudice\u2014as people. And a lot of that could happen through AI<\/a>, if it\u2019s used wisely<\/u>. \u201cIt is likely that machine perspectives will be more naturally global than those of professional politicians,\u201d Dasgupta writes. \u201cAI 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.\u201d<\/p>\n 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<\/em>, tech guru Ray Kurzweil writes that advanced AI will soon turn plodding, \u201clinear\u201d progress in many fields\u2014from medicine to agriculture to manufacturing\u2014into \u201cexponential\u201d 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.<\/p>\n And should we really be lamenting the advancing judgement of new generations of AI when our own judgement\u2014human judgement, that is\u2014appears to have hit a wall?<\/p>\n The future, in other words, is completely unknowable\u2014except to say we\u2019re fairly sure at this point it\u2019s not going to continue on the same path, either geopolitically or technologically, that we\u2019ve been on since World War II.<\/p>\n Above all, the postwar world system has outgrown its progenitor, the United States. Perhaps nothing is more compelling than Dasgupta\u2019s recent observation<\/a> that Americans\u2019 \u201cintellectual grasp of what\u2019s going on in the world is hugely diminished.\u201d This is no longer a problem of the average undereducated American; now it is our elites in Washington who don\u2019t understand the system that their forebears designed. And that is likely the most decisive death sentence of all to the old system.<\/p>\n No one knows what the answer is. But that doesn\u2019t mean that an answer we can\u2019t possibly anticipate, for good or ill, isn\u2019t going to make its appearance\u2014and perhaps soon.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
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