Week signals: The bigger picture
Plus: watch points for South Korea, India, Samoa, Thailand, and Venezuela.
Hello,
In this week’s edition of Week Signals:
IN REVIEW. Unilateral leadership and multipolar power, understanding the present by forecasting the future, and the opportunities in volatility.
UP AHEAD. Korea’s summits, India’s tariffs, Samoa’s election, Thailand’s crisis, and Venezuela’s dilemma.
And don’t forget to connect with me on LinkedIn.
Week Signals is the Saturday note for clients of Geopolitical Strategy, also available to GD Professional subscribers on Geopolitical Dispatch.
The Week in Review: A longer view
The week began with a hastily arranged summit of European leaders in the Oval Office. It ended with Federal Reserve Chair Jay Powell essentially bowing to pressure on a September rate cut. Whether it was Europe yielding to America, or Powell yielding to Trump, it was another week of the White House getting its way.
Zoom out, however, and it was also a week of seeming triumph for two of Washington’s traditional adversaries. Xi Jinping visited Tibet, showing his vigour (not many 72-year-olds can perform at Lhasa’s high altitudes – double that of Jackson Hole, in case you wondered), and his command of a historically restless place. Vladimir Putin continued his war on Ukraine with near impunity, released at least temporarily from the threat of US consequences and with his foreign minister backtracking on everything that was apparently agreed the week before.
Yet irrespective of who you believe is the better dealmaker, or what their motivating factors might be, through the sheer will of Trump, Xi and Putin, if nothing else, events do seem to be grinding towards a return to the one we outlined in February: a world with three poles.
None of this is inevitable. The US still has options to arrest its declining hegemony. A multipolar world, unlike arguably a bipolar one, is more liable to disruption and new entrants (Brazil? India? Turkey?) as each major power tries to upend the other through alliance and division (a similar dynamic exists in industries where the more leading firms, the more entrants and disruption). Still, it seems the most logical outcome on the current path.
Multipolar orders have been stable and frequent over human history, most recently in the 19th-century Concert of Europe, between the Napoleonic Wars and 1914, and the Westphalian system between 1648 and the revolutions of the late 18th century. And while neither of these periods was free from war, there was both an agreed system of rules and a common sense of “order” to allow states, industries and individuals (with exception) to flourish. Indeed, the scientific and economic advancements of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution would have been impossible without them.
Yet a multipolar world, like all stages of history and systems of order, is best seen with 20-20 hindsight. Like a financial bubble or an economic recession, it’s only really seen in the past. You can predict world order, but you can’t know it just by examining its earliest stages, as we are probably in right now.
So what’s the solution? Futurology. This is where we can take a speculative view of the next few decades and then back-cast the intervening period to arrive at some semi-useful scenarios to contextualise our current moment not just as the culmination of what’s gone before, but as the entry point for what may happen next.
We’re not futurists at Geopolitical Strategy, and generally prefer taking lessons from the past, but if there’s a moment for crystal ball gazing beyond the froth of the current moment – with its intersecting challenges on security, tariffs, climate change, artificial intelligence, and demographics – then maybe this is it.
It’s often hard to see the outlook for the next seven days (though we try – see the Week Ahead section, below), but let’s try the next seventy years, out to the end of the 21st century, which should also coincide with what long-range forecasters like David Murrin, Peter Turchin, Neil Howe and George Friedman see as the end point of the long-term political cycle we may (or may not) be entering into.