In a landmark June speech delivered to the Economic Club of New York commemorating the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent talked of a new economic statecraft, rejecting the long-established U.S. commitments to free trade, the free movement of capital, and an open world economy. The speech turned 80 years of U.S. international policy on its head.

The United States would now practice the “disciplined use of America’s economic power in service of our sovereignty” by weaponizing U.S. assets, including the dollar and U.S. control of the international payments system, by building national capacity and by requiring the world to accept U.S.-imposed protocols. This would, Bessent said, entrench U.S. global leadership even if it meant imposing sanctions not just on adversaries but on long-friendly countries where necessary. These allies would be subject to “non-negotiable obligations.”

In a landmark June speech delivered to the Economic Club of New York commemorating the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent talked of a new economic statecraft, rejecting the long-established U.S. commitments to free trade, the free movement of capital, and an open world economy. The speech turned 80 years of U.S. international policy on its head.

The United States would now practice the “disciplined use of America’s economic power in service of our sovereignty” by weaponizing U.S. assets, including the dollar and U.S. control of the international payments system, by building national capacity and by requiring the world to accept U.S.-imposed protocols. This would, Bessent said, entrench U.S. global leadership even if it meant imposing sanctions not just on adversaries but on long-friendly countries where necessary. These allies would be subject to “non-negotiable obligations.”

The speech followed a November 2024 note by Stephen Miran, who would later become chair of U.S. President Donald Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers, that envisaged a “Mar-a-Lago Accord” with the United States restructuring the global economic order entirely in its national interests. Both signaled that the decades-old Washington Consensus no longer had the support of Washington itself. If in the past the United States acted multilaterally in a unipolar world, now it would act unilaterally—despite the fact that ours is becoming a multipolar world.

We cannot overstate the importance of the changes now underway. Just as three Western-led world orders—the Concert of Europe after 1815, the League of Nations from 1918 to 1939, and the United Nations Charter-led order of 1945—rose and fell in the last two centuries, so too the fourth order, the U.S.-led liberal international order triumphantly announced by George H.W. Bush in 1990, is now declared by its authors to be dead, having lasted little longer than today’s average marriage. But the question that matters is whether we are condemned to return to a world divided into spheres of influence or to a U.S.-China “one world, two systems” future or, simply, to disorder. Or is a fifth and stable world order now possible, and, if so, could it be grounded in something more solid than temporary marriages of diplomatic convenience? And what form might it have to take if we are to restore the domestic legitimacy that the post-1990 order lost—and failed fully to recover—after the global financial crisis?

Having spent the better part of the last two years traveling through the post-industrial towns of Britain and parts of Europe and the United States, and through the corridors and inner sanctums of international institutions whose authority has been visibly ebbing, what I have discerned everywhere is the same compound of anger and grief. Indeed, what strikes me most is the consistency with which people across countries as different as Nigeria and Norway, Brazil and Belgium, India and Ireland, identify the same underlying experience of having been promised something only to be let down and realizing, for the first time, that they are unlikely to be better off than their parents. It is the feeling that the system serves others, not them—a loss of the sense of belonging to a community capable of collective action.

But what has also struck me—and this is the source of hope—is that beneath the anger and grief is a persistent, almost defiant desire for things to be different. It is not surprising that no politician today is going to be elected on a “steady as she goes” platform, akin to the successful British Conservative slogan of “Safety First” in the 1920s or the famous German slogan of “No Experiments!” that won the day in 1957. Those were the eras when incumbency was not a dirty word. No longer. Every election has now become a change election, and no one can be elected or reelected without promising a version of change.

Populist nationalist parties are leading the polls in most major Western economies. Their popularity reflects something more than the predictable anti-incumbent reaction when governments have fared badly or been in power for a long time. Instead, we are seeing something more like an anti-system revolt, as once-fringe parties perform best on the claim that they represent the people against the establishment, whether that be political or business elites. But if we are to find the reasons for this shift, we must first understand what is actually broken and in particular the depth of the changes underway in our world.

An employee walks past newly made U.S. flags at a factory in Fuyang in China’s Anhui province on July 13, 2018.AFP via Getty Images

Historians will look back on three ruptures, each turbocharged by recent wars and each reinforcing the others. Each is a product of the shifting of the world’s economic center of gravity now underway from West to East, as Asia has come to account for the majority of global manufacturing and economic activity.

First, the geopolitical rupture. The world is moving from the certainties of a U.S.-dominated unipolar order to the dangerous unpredictability of a multipolar one, a world with multiple centers of decision-making power but none of them possessing the hegemonic capacity an unrivaled United States once enjoyed to impose global order at will.

Second, the economics rupture. The world is moving—as Bessent’s speech confirmed—from the open trading system that underpinned postwar prosperity to a neo-mercantilist world of tariffs, sanctions, and export and import bans, along with restrictions on investment and technology. This new world is made more dangerous by the capacity of states to weaponize chokepoints in the global economy, whether those be at sea, such as the Strait of Hormuz, or through control of critical minerals or, as in the U.S. case, through a dollar-dominated financial payments system. At its most extreme, it amounts to nothing less than a form of economic warfare.

And third, the political rupture. We are moving from a rules-based international order to a power-based, “might makes right” one, with every single pillar of the traditional world order now under threat: the rule of law, support for human rights, democratic accountability, multilateral cooperation, and global public goods, not least humanitarian aid and environmental stewardship. Bad enough is the return of an across-the-board, “my country first and only” nationalism that we thought had been consigned to history. Worse is its new authoritarian and populist manifestation and the adoption of a zero-sum mindset that has become the operating logic of major-power competition—the view that for me to do well, my competitor must do badly.

And if Bessent laid bare the extent of the rejection of traditional U.S. economic orthodoxy, then Trump’s apocalyptic warning to........

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