2025: Hegemonic Suicide and Other Innovations
Every generation, on reaching middle age, begins to see the world around them in decline in order to habituate themselves to their own decay. So when I find myself in a nostalgic mood I have to be vigilant. It’s a reactionary feeling to nurture and almost never a productive one.
But it’s hard to shake the feeling that at least some things are not going well.
• This may finally be the year the US liberal order lost its claim to dominance. I know this is welcome news to some, but as someone who suspects it’s the worst global order except for all the others, I’m not excited about its replacement.
The strange thing is this defeat is almost entirely self-imposed. As with the Soviet collapse, the cause is hegemonic suicide.
We should appreciate how unusual that is. For thousands of years, from Ancient Babylon to Nazi Germany, great power war has been the engine of history. But what happens when that engine stops turning, when nuclear weapons make hegemonic war impossible?
To use another metaphor, great power war has historically served as the forest fire of geopolitics. Horrific in its destruction but also a shock to the system that shattered sclerotic institutions, forced rapid modernization, and clarified global hierarchies.
In a nuclear world, the forest fire is suppressed. The dead wood of overextended empires, elite corruption, and institutional bloat is never burned away. Instead the kinetic energy of decline is funneled inward, turning into polarization and civil strife.
It may be that in the nuclear age the catalyst for great power transitions now becomes internal decay and institutional senescence. If so, the Soviet collapse was not the end of a bygone era but a preview of how great power shifts and global order transitions will look in the future.
• The infiltration of gambling into everyday life, including children’s lives, was another depressing trend of the year. I think much of this has to do with the spread of prediction markets, and there is a buried class issue here. Gambling went from a low-status pathology (“lottery tickets are for poor people”) to a high-tech efficient-markets truth machine for credentialed strivers. Skilled gamblers in casinos are treated as degenerate parasites, but if you’re successful on Polymarket you get invited for an interview on 60 Minutes. After all, aren’t Ivy League quants just harvesting alpha? In both cases the winnings are funded by a large base of losers.
• The year 2025 was also when antisemitism came back into mainstream discourse. I think this is a long-term trend, a return to “default” pre-modern beliefs, and stems from a confluence of factors I briefly mentioned here. More on this later.
• Speaking of a return to pre-modern beliefs. The year 2025 also marks the closing of the Gutenberg Parenthesis. No one is reading long form. The emergence of the post-literacy world is accompanied by the rise of Medieval Peasant Brain, a mental soup of superstition and magical thinking bolstered by tech-enabled information bubbles. We see this most clearly in the mainstreaming of xenophobia, conspiracies, quack medicines, and naked fascism.
This epistemic fragmentation, now supercharged by LLMs, has asymmetric effects across regimes. Dictators love and encourage social atomization because it makes people nihilistic and prevents collective action. Hence Russia’s love for info-noise. In democracies, by contrast, atomization prevents the deliberation needed for the system to function. That’s why artificial intelligence, even if it fulfills its promise of streamlining governance, will benefit autocracies more than democracies.
It’s tempting to blame these problems on some vague cultural decline or “decadence” as Ross Douthat might put it. But what unites them is more specific. Once upon a time, institutions used to constrain certain pathologies. Regulatory bodies limited predatory gambling, educational systems tried to teach critical evaluation of information, mass media maintained a sort of monoculture (which came with its own problems). But these have all been captured, defunded, or rendered technologically obsolete. When institutional constraints fail, older patterns reassert themselves, and in that transition both predation and autocracy find new opportunities.
Finally, this year I wrote or co-wrote several pieces for academic and non-academic publications. They are all open-access or otherwise accessible through the links below:
Non-Academic
The New Price of Statehood. Foreign Affairs, May 20, 2025. With Ryan D. Griffiths.
Prosecuting the Powerful: Historical data shows putting leaders on trial is a healthy democratic practice. Foreign Policy, October 28. 2025. With Semuhi Sinanoglu and Sahib Jafarov.
The Forgotten Dystopian Vision That Explains Trump’s Canada Obsession. The New Republic, March 31, 2025. [not my favorite headline. see also HERE]
Academic
The Invisible Front: Ukraine’s IT Army and the Evolution of Cyber Resistance. Post-Soviet Affairs 41.4, May 2025. With Anna Lysenko. [PDF]
Hegemonic Shocks and Patterns of Secession. International Interactions 51.4, June 2025. With Kyungwon Suh and Ryan Griffiths. [PDF]
The Tragedy of Offensive Realism. Part of a forum at International Studies Review, currently inaccessible. You can just read THIS instead.
A lot more coming in 2026. Happy New Year.
Sharp piece on how institutional constraints collapse before behaviors do. The framing of hegemon decline as 'suicide' rather than defeat is key, cause it highlights agency in the process. I've been thinking alot about how nuclear deterrence essentially freezes the forest fire metaphor you use, letting deadwood accumulate until internal pressure cracks the system. The Medieval Peasant Brain concept nails the regression pattern when gatekeeping institutions get captured or made obsolete.
Civilization could be on the cusp of a new enlightenment, similar to the arrival of the Gutenburg press. Stepping into a new, unfamiliar space, or one that is undergoing drastic changes, can feel very unsettling. I had a first person seat at the table when Microsoft introduced the first PC's; it was a traumatic time for many. I would recommend reading "In The Age Of Smart Machines", 1988, author Soshana Zubhoff; she shines a light this transition period and the unsettling angst it created in many. Y2K could be another case study on angst, even though it unfolded into business as usual.