The world we seek to understand
Born shortly after the end of the World War II, my generation has long considered itself fortunate not to have known, let alone fought in, a world war. But no one can be sure anymore how long this fragile peace can endure. My sense is that the major powers are again sleepwalking toward war in a vain and thoughtless attempt to manage a world that has long slipped out of anyone’s control.
That world has grown immensely complex. It is differentiated into functional spheres—economy, politics, science, law, technology, and media—each driven by its own logic and resistant to central coordination. What is economically rational is often ecologically destructive; what is efficient (like artificial intelligence) may corrode what makes us human. Economic growth has proceeded alongside widening inequality; material abundance has multiplied without a corresponding rise in human well-being.
The postwar order that modernization was expected to deliver was imagined as a coherent package: market economies, democratic politics, universal education, the rule of law, a free press, civilian control of the military, and independent science. Together, these were meant to produce prosperity and stability. What was less appreciated was that modernity also entailed the uneven and autonomous development of these domains, with no central authority capable of harmonizing their effects. Globalization proved to be anything but seamless. It produced a few winners and many losers, both within countries and across them.
Countries that sought to maximize their gains from these transformations soon encountered the limits of control under heightened complexity. Gradually, they learned to adjust to a polycentric world society that no single nation, however powerful, could plausibly manage. The institutions once expected to provide global governance, the United Nations and its Security Council, have proved largely incapable of producing decisions binding on the world as a whole.
Emerging from the World War II as the only major power unscathed by war, the United States long assumed it could direct global developments across virtually all domains of human activity. This confidence was reinforced after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. For roughly two decades thereafter, American preeminence appeared unassailable. Since then, however, that dominance has been in steady, if uneven, decline.
By contrast, China’s rise—as an economic powerhouse, a hub of scientific and technological development, and a formidable military actor—has been swift and unprecedented. Benefiting more than any other country from its US-sponsored entry into the global economy, China moved from cheap labor manufacturing to technological leadership, offering developing countries access to capital, infrastructure, and advanced education.
This is the world in which the US is now attempting to reassert its hegemony. The perception of China as a formidable rival did not begin with US President Donald Trump. What distinguishes the present moment is that these efforts are no longer couched in terms of shared values or a common global future. They have become instead self-referential, transactional, and openly coercive.
The clearest articulation of this posture appears in the US’ most recent National Security Strategy, released in November 2025. There, the Western Hemisphere—from Greenland to Argentina—is defined as an immediate security perimeter, with access to American capital, technology, markets, and security guarantees treated not as public goods but as leverage to enforce alignment.
Recent events in Venezuela starkly reveal the limits of this approach. Early this month, the US launched a large-scale military operation there, capturing President Nicolás Maduro, who was then taken to the US to face criminal charges. The intervention—the most direct American military action in Latin America in decades—has drawn sharp international criticism and raised serious legal questions. Even as US officials have spoken of overseeing aspects of Venezuela’s political and economic future, governance on the ground remains contested. This episode underscores the difficulty of imposing control even over a single country.
All this is undertaken in the name of making America great again. Few countries are presently in a position to openly challenge such unilateral assertiveness. Yet the deeper problem lies elsewhere. This effort rests on a basic misreading of the world as it has become. It assumes that a complex and highly differentiated world can be steered as if it were hierarchically ordered and politically pliable.
That assumption is the real hubris of our time. Attempts to impose coherence on a world that resists it may yield illusory gains. But, more likely, they will deepen existing conflicts and hasten the very instability they seek to manage.
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